When I actually went to the source for the 240hz claim, I didn’t reach the same conclusion as the testers?
Maybe they just let their rigol scope spit out 240hz, but 480hz worst case and I would actually say 960hz. I think what’s happening with the tandem oled is they both pwm at 480hz and 180 degrees out of phase giving effective 960hz when both are in use. Which appears to be most of the usable brightness.
Edit: I’m so confused.
“The PWM behavior is interesting, because we can see DC-dimming for all brightness levels. Usually, OLED panels use DC-Dimming only at higher brightness levels. The frequency is very low at 240 Hz, however, and this might be an issue for sensitive users, despite the DC-dimming. ”
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Amazing-OLED-panel-Apple-MacBo...
You’re right - looking at the scope pictures, the horizontal period of the grid is 2ms, and the period of the wave is just over that.
A 240Hz wave would have a period of 4.17ms. 480Hz is 2.08ms. Much closer to the oscilloscope waveforms. And even then the waveforms are periodic, with smaller troughs at every second dip.
I wish I could see their test setup. It would be ironic if the panel was fully DC dimmed and the troughs were from another light source or something…
I’m not sure why the scope is saying 240 though. It makes me doubt my understanding :-/.
[Edit: Ah - got it! It’s measuring the frequency of the very lowest points - the ‘every second dip’]
> Or every second time a particular value is reached.
The value is waving, so a complete cycle is when it got back to where it started: that is, not just its value but its _direction of change_ is also the same.
(A value waving in 3D could coincide with its start value multiple times before it completes a whole cycle.)
The difficulty here is that it's 480Hz top-to-top, but there are two definitions of dip-to-dip depending on if you count every 'dip' from 100% (480Hz), or just the ones that reach the lowest voltage ⃰ (240Hz).
⃰ ⃰(brightness - presumably the test setup is an LDR or something?)
Here's my hypothesis: I'm guessing that the reviewer is using some kind of photodetector that is sensitive, to different extents, to different portions of the screen. And that the actual display modulates at 240Hz but that some portions of the screen are 180 degrees out of phase with other portions. Or that one of the subpixel colors is out of phase with the others. This could explain the weird alternating-depth signal at ~2ms intervals.
That doesn't look like it's even close to being able to focus on a single subpixel or even a single row without additional optics.
In any case, the 0% and 25% waveforms look pretty bad. In my experience, light with sharp, short pulses (like "driverless" LED lights produce) are unpleasant, but the unpleasantness is related to how bright the source is compared to everything else in the field of view. (The 0% and 25% waveforms are solidly at twice the frequency of driverless LEDs, which will make the effect considerably less bad.)
Older samsung galaxy phones (till ~S21) had HW 960fps mode where it recorded 0.2s on sensor before switching back to normal fps. It is not macro, but maybe it could show the flicker rate of the whole screen or halves out of phase.
Their method is a photo detector driving the oscilloscope, right?
How can they assume the rise/fall slope in those plots is characterizing the driving electrical signal? Wouldn't a PWM driver be able to have much faster transitions and look more square than that at these time scales?
It makes me wonder if this is the response of the organic phosphors and the difference in apparent "depth" of the dip is really just a difference of duration, since the dips are very V-shaped, rather than bottoming out.
It is slightly odd that it has this paired rhythm, but I don't think you can assume it is "DC-dimming" rather than just PWM quanta that are being anti-alias filtered by the phosphors and measurement methodology.
Isn't it the other way around? They're claiming it's PWM, not DC dimming - DC dimming would be smooth, this isn't.
And tbh I don't think the PWM driver is particularly interesting, nor are they claiming to be measuring it. The display itself is flickering, which is what they're measuring and what the problem (for some) is.
I'm glad that this is bringing attention to flicker sensitivity.
Here are some other things that people are sensitive to:
- CRI on white LEDs (and flourencents).
CRI is how clean the spectrum is in comparison to the sun or a incandescent bulb, where the specturm is completely even. There are some CRI >=95 LEDs that are fine for most people however.
- Motion blur
Motion blur on LCDs (such as ~50% of Nintendo Switch 2s) can hurt eyes trying to keep track of what is going on.
Also flicker on bad LED lighting. A lot of bad LED lighting flickers at ~60Hz. In rooms lit by that, you can wave your hand or a thin object back and forth, and if you look carefully, you can perceive a "shutter" effect where you're only seeing the snapshots of its position where the light is on.
The thing that makes that so insidious is that not everybody can easily perceive that.
(The reason why such flicker is common in cheap LED bulbs: they turn AC into DC using a half-wave rectifier, which just chops off half the AC wave. This is also why you can still see the effect in rooms lit by multiple lights, because the flicker is in sync, synchronized to the incoming AC.)
If you are building a space for other people and you are responsible for the lighting, please check for this. If you can't perceive it yourself, find someone who can.
Not everybody can see this, but, if you want to help someone see PWM sources, choose a single color (e.g., red, largely in case the primaries are time separated), make a simple dot or line, and wave it around in the peripheral vision of your doubter.
Humans are very sensitive to flicker in peripheral vision. Have them look at something across the room and then blow their mind.
(Note: easier with a phone, but doable with a laptop.)
> If you can't perceive it yourself, find someone who can.
Or just use your phone’s slo-mo feature to take a 240 FPS video (which then gets played back at 30 FPS). 60 Hz flicker becomes extremely visible. More than once I’ve noticed the strobe effect and then confirmed it this way.
When I've had a coffee too much, I notice the 120 Hz flicker even more. But even when I'm tired and don't, my mood still noticeably increases when I leave flickery spaces. (I sometimes test my hunch with the slow-motion cam as I am leaving.)
I've tried looking for studies to prove or disprove my experience. They should be easy to find, right? Humanity is replacing the entire planet's lighting with LEDs after all! Comment sections have been busy with people arguing about PWM flicker for years, probably longer. What is the best study you can find? For me, it is always the one from 1989 about pre-LED 60 Hz office lighting (that said it had adverse effects). Seriously...?
I wish I was a Bitcoin billionaire, for many reasons, but doing another study on flickery LED lighting seems like the lowest-hanging fruit of our entire civilization. I live in a country that is regulated to hell and back, and yet even our street lights flicker visibly, not to mention classrooms, children's bedrooms, and the screens that people stare at for hours every day. I don't get it.
60Hz flicker is rare. Most cheap/driverless LEDs are full-wave rectified or at least alternate half-wave pixels and thus flicker at twice the mains frequency, giving 120Hz in the US.
> In rooms lit by that, you can wave your hand or a thin object back and forth, and if you look carefully, you can perceive a "shutter" effect where you're only seeing the snapshots of its position where the light is on.
Heh, this is how I test these lamps as well. Also my camera has anti-flicker shutter which can detect it to thwart it by syncing the shutter release with flicker itself. It shows a warning when it detects is, as well.
> Also my camera has anti-flicker shutter which can detect it to thwart it by syncing the shutter release with flicker itself. It shows a warning when it detects is, as well.
Nice! Which cameras do this? And I wonder, how cheaply could a sensor be made to do this, that shows on the screen "there's flicker at 60Hz / 120Hz / 480Hz", if it didn't also need to be a great camera (e.g. it only captured at 480p)?
Mine is a Sony A7-III, the setting is called Anti-flicker shoot. I believe many modern mirrorless systems have the capability.
However, I wouldn't say "oh that's easy", because A7-III has two realtime DSPs, and one of them is directly responsible for things like real-time focusing, face/object/eye recognition and real time tracking, etc. So, I believe that DSP is handling the flicker detection as well.
...and A7-III is the "entry level" member of its generation. higher end models have more computing power than that.
Not all the manufacturers have an automatic setting for this, unfortunately. Nikon being a prime example. They do have shutter speed micro adjustments but it would be nice to have automatic detection.
The bigger issue with their top end cameras (i.e. the Z9 and Z8) is that without mechanical shutters you’re pretty stuffed if you have mismatched strobing from lights, which it turns out is very common. I’ve shot both an opera and a wedding recently where different lights were strobing at different incorrect speeds. It was particularly noticeable on a dimmable stage light in one production - I was sat there for about 10 minutes dialling in exactly the right speed to minimise it.
The power supply is the weak point in LED room lighting. The best power supply for LEDs is switch-mode PWM, high frequency, and with thermal management designed by an engineer who understands therodynamics.
Unfortunately all those things are expensive so you rarely find such bulbs in the cheap bin at Home Depot.
Bulbs are actually a very bad form factor for LEDs, because they concentrate two heat-generating components - the PSU and LEDs - into a small chassis. LED tape with a separate power supply is probably the best solution that's not a full-custom DC light fixture.
It's very unfortunate that our electric codes are based primarily on incandescent lighting. If we were designing electricity from scratch, we'd probably be set up with 240v 3 phase AC for big loads (ovens, heaters etc) and 48v DC for lighting and most electronics. Requiring every device to have its own rectifier is a lot less efficient than putting a single good rectifier in a central location.
> Requiring every device to have its own rectifier is a lot less efficient than putting a single good rectifier in a central location.
Is it, though?
You'd have to deal with additional wiring losses due to the lower voltage between the central rectifier and the devices, and the various individual devices would still need their own step-down converters to turn that 48VDC into something they can actually use.
On top of that: the central rectifier would have to be sized for peak load, while in reality the vast majority of the time it would be running at only a fraction of that. That's not exactly ideal for efficient operation. Individual power supplies can be designed specifically for a single device and operate at its sweet spot most of the time.
> You'd have to deal with additional wiring losses due to the lower voltage between the central rectifier and the devices
No. Everybody always complains about voltage drop. It's not a problem with LED lighting loads because they use so much less power. Let me prove it to you.
Assume we use the same 14-gauge copper Romex for our 48VDC lighting circuit that is already inside most home walls in the USA.
DC resistance of 14-gauge copper wire: 0.002525 ohms per foot.
Voltage drop over a circuit:
Current x Ohms/foot x Two-way distance
--------------------------------------
Nominal Voltage
Assume we're driving a 13-watt LED bulb (typical 100W incandescent equivalent) that is 50 feet from the supply.
Current would be 13w/48v = 270mA.
.270A x 0.002525Ohms/foot x 100feet
-----------------------------------
48v
= 0.00142V
So the voltage drop is 0.14%. Any voltage drop less than 3% is considered
acceptable by NEC.
Oh, but what if I want to run more than one bulb? Fine, let's do 10
bulbs on the same 14-gauge supply wire. Now the voltage drop is 1.4%. Still less than half the maximum limit.
And this is 14-gauge wire. What about 12-gauge? Well, that's 0.001588 ohms/foot.
.270 x 0.001588 x 100
---------------------
48
Now for 10 bulbs the voltage drop is eight tenths of a percent.
Running LED room lighting in a standard American house at 48VDC on the 14-gauge wire that's already in the walls is completely doable.
Yes, we still need constant-current supplies in or near the bulbs, and those are not 100% efficient. Keep in mind also that some of that 13 watts we assumed above is for typical Home Depot 120VAC bulbs that have builtin rectifiers and [probably] crappy power supplies, so the waste power used by the constant-current supplies I'm talking about here -- which are simpler than the supplies used in Home Depot bulbs -- is probably less.
DC doesn't buy you that much for electronics. You still need to do DC-DC conversion to 12V or 5/3V for the electronics itself.
And to avoid ground loops, you also need fully isolated DC-DC converters. So you end up with the same power supply architecture as for AC-DC, saving only on buffer capacitors.
As an experiment, I converted my homelab to 48V DC to operate from the battery directly after my attempts at making a UPS failed. It works, but it's barely more efficient than doing a double-conversion.
I'm now redoing lighting in my house, and _there_ the DC power makes a lot of sense. I'm planning to use commercial-grade DALI, with tunable white setpoint. It uses true DC dimming, so there's no flicker whatsoever.
Manufacturers are selling DC bulb systems these days. Unfortunately, the ones I've seen sell the accompanying rectifiers (which need maybe $50-100 of power electronics inside) for multiple thousands of dollars, and they're DRM locked to the more expensive bulbs by proprietary protocols.
I find the inefficiencies of the old system more manageable.
+1 on the attention. There are probably so many humans around the world (I'd estimate in the millions easily, assuming this affects even 1% of the population) who get eye strain and headaches from their oled devices (or even "modern" LEDs! Brake lights are terrible!) but never realize the cause.
Btw for anyone wondering, recent "Chinese" phones appear to do a damn good job. I have a recent BBK device, and I run eye comfort mode on 24/7, and despite being hyper sensitive to pwm (my previous oled phone was bad), this is quite comfortable.
Brake lights could be terrible but headlights are much worse because they are always on at night, they got brighter and are pointed to cars coming into the other direction. Furthermore for some reason it seems that newer cars point their lights almost horizontally. It's as bad also when a car is following me. I never switched my mirror in the low reflection position as often as in the last few years.
OLED doesn't bother me much (I'm fine with iPhone's OLED screen even at 60FPS mode), but my eyes hate low CRI, flickery LEDs.
Bottom of the barrel, eye searing cool white LEDs with bad CRI and flicker control makes my life really harder. Low quality florescent bulbs also create eye strain for me.
The best solution I have found is 90CRI, dimmable Philips LED bulbs. They grow warmer as you dim them, and they create a very comfortable environment for me. Also, a big Bauhaus branch in my city uses mixed temperature LEDs to tune resulting color and temperature. Since ceilings are so high, you don't see the lamps and feels like you're walking under sunlight. It's that good, kudos to them.
When I was a kid I learned that the CRT screen refresh rate must be set to at least 60Hz otherwise it looks like crap and is pain to look at. My cousin had his set to some lower value and would claim not so see any issue. His father said "I don't know how these damn kids stare all day long at the screen, I stare half an hour and I get a headache!" because you're one setting away from not having the headache but you won't let me change it because reasons.
My parents have a plasma TV and I can clearly see it flicker, although it doesn't cause any pain.
These are what I buy, they are great. But I recommend checking locally first. In my area, at least, the government and/or power company subsidize LED bulbs so they're substantially cheaper if I buy locally instead of from Amazon.
On the other end is motion stutter on OLEDs. Because of sample-and-hold, the blur goes away but the image stutters on slow moving scenes instead. If your eyes are sensitive to PWM (mine are) it's quite annoying to watch OLED movement as well.
Is that what I'm seeing on my LG C series? Every so often when I'm watching streaming video, and the scene changes, the action seems to skip frames for maybe a quarter of a second. It happens rarely enough that I haven't narrowed it down to the TV, the attached Chromecast, the streaming app, or the content.
The only setting I recall changing on the TV is the one that stops the soap-opera effect.
Objectively speaking high fps is a better representation of motion. As a gamer I got used to high framerate content very quickly. I recommend biting the bullet, getting over the soap opera connotation, and enjoying all your screen has to offer.
Not it hurts to watch the judder of 30fps camera pans.
I think you're seeing telecine judder. The video's framerate doesn't find the diplay's refresh rate, and the TV doesn't handle it well. This is why my old Pioreer Kuro switched to 48hz on 24fps content, and it was amazing.
I was building a lego set with my son several years ago and at some point (after the sun went down) realized I could no longer distinguish between the green and grey pieces, though it had been obvious under natural light. It was a striking demonstration of CRI.
Agreed. A couple years ago I got a fancy 4k LG OLED monitor (32GS95UE-B, with the improved subpixel layout), and had to return it two days later. My eyes were literally red from strain, which is how I learned I'm likely PWM flicker sensitive (and that too has only a slight 240hz flicker according to rtings).
Now I go purely for IPS and make sure it's flicker-free. I'm really glad the new MBP screens are an extra and not the new default yet.
This happened to me with the exact same monitor model! I generally don’t have issues with OLED screens so I still don’t know what made that particular monitor so evil. I’m not convinced it was completely caused by the PWM, I think it might be related to the matte coating and text fringe combined with the PWM being the cherry on top.
I switched to a MiniLED screen and it all went away. I even tried to keep the monitor for gaming but I can’t last more than half an hour.
Odd. A traditional 35mm cinema projector produces much deeper brightness modulation at a much lower frequency. Were you ever affected by film projection?
Haven’t noticed, though I rarely go to the cinema.
It’s worth noting though that for the monitor it may be used 10+ hours a day, while watching a movie is a one-time two hours - this is also why I don’t mind my oled tv being tiring to my eyes. I do feel it after prolonged sessions, but I don’t use it nearly enough for it to matter.
Color rendering with LEDs is so terrible. And buying proper lights is either close to illegal (e.g. halogens) for efficiency reasons, or high quality LEDs are almost impossible to buy - "call us for quote" and similar nonsense.
The absolutely worst were the default indoor lights in Australia. There must have been some giant shipment of worst possible lights that they purchased to light up every bathroom in the country.
This world wide transition to cheap LEDs stole a lot of joy from the world.
If I search "CRI95 LED" from Denmark, I get lots of results, though almost all from lighting shops/retailers rather than DIY stores. They seem to cost about 2-3× the price of a normal LED bulb.
CRI90 is much easier, most Ikea LED bulbs achieve this.
Not in Switzerland. It gives me 1-2 german shops. Swiss retailers sometimes admit such products exist, but always out of stock.
And if you try to do some research and find high CRI lights that test well, those are pretty much impossible to buy.
As someone who’s had a concussion, this is really interesting. For me this is how any screen was to me, not just bright OLED ones. Even more interestingly it’s essentially only screens— backlist posters at the mall (paper with a backlight) still affect it but less so. To me perhaps it’s focusing on something on a screen that does this, but it’s really interesting to see this affect the general population.
It’s also odd to think about lack of ability to concentrate, and I wonder if screens cause this optically somehow but to a less noticeable degree even when less intense than this new one? (Independent distracting contents)
I noticed that adding a severe red filter to all my screens helped me significantly with the concussion and am also curious about that, would that impact the intensity of a refresh perhaps? Is blue light specifically the problem? I’m unsure but have a plethora of subjective experience.
I’m glad for this to enter public consciousness a bit and would love to see more research on the screen itself impacting our brain.
After I had a psychosis (it was still 'active' at the time, in hindsight, but not as severe) I couldn't use a monitor for long, especially not gaming. It gave me immediate motion sickness, or made the headache more severe. Hw was TFT 1080p LCD screen, GPU was probably AMD 7770 HD, since a few years afterwards I replaced that with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 960.
My matte MBP 2010 didn't yield me this issue, but I didn't game on it either; just watched movies/series. A lot of them.
I grew up with CRT monitors though, and these could cause severe headaches. Especially if resolution too high.
curious; do you mean like a red plastic see-thru filter applied on top of the screen (filtering the backlight too, like those screen protectors), or a software screen effect that makes everything on screen appear red (which on an OLED screen would probably be the same thing)?
red/blue/green detectors (cones) in our eyes use different paths and have different "refresh rates" than luminous intensity sensors (rods), im wondering if filtering to a single color makes the rods take over for visual pattern processing
I am shocked that Apple would release a screen with such a low PWM frequency. Here is a paper showing humans can perceive flicker at frequencies more than double their display’s rate: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07861
It's not even about perception at all. For some (like me) it seems to be related to muscles in the eyes reacting all the time and fatiguing, it seems such muscles can react much faster than our "perception" of flicker, so something like a 10khz PWM driven display still causes fatigue, even though there's no way you can see it. People that get headaches are probably experiencing something different.
The change in that study was dramatically different: they had half the screen black and half white and were flipping which side was which at that rate. Yes, most people could perceive that. The study included 10 participants, all in their 20s. They didn't ask about headaches other observed effects afterward.
The purpose of that study was to show that the traditional fusion frequency, which is in the range of 50 to 90 Hz for most people, is valid only for what it was initially measured, i.e. the threshold where a sequence of complete static images is perceived to consist of continuous movements.
But when some new display technology is based on showing various image fragments at moments shifted in time, expecting that the eye will integrate them over time to form complete images and continuous movements, that may require higher sampling frequencies, up to 10 times higher, due to the interaction with the fast subconscious eye movements.
The study results are not surprising at all, and this is an effect that should be kept in mind by anyone who designs displays.
I'd love for more research to be made into PWM sensitivity, if only to find out roughly how many people experience problems with it.
I've never had issues with it other than when trying to film certain old displays, but then again, I've never had issues with PAL TV sets running at 50 hz interlaced, nor even old PC CRTs running at 60, which definitely was not 'flicker-free', so I'm probably on the far end of the spectrum compared to the PWM sensitive.
It's an easy thing to forget, as with many accessibility features. And it's going to suck to have the nominally best display be one you just can't use if want to not feel like gouging your eyes out.
I notice PWM all around me all the time. Lots of cheaper LED lights use it, and I see it whenever I move my eyes, also when not consciously looking for it - instead of a blur I see series of lamps as a brief afterimage.
As a child I got headaches from CRT monitors at 60hz and I could see them flicker. I haven't noticed the PWM on modern monitors, but maybe these Apple ones would trigger me?
The cheap LEDs are not intentionally pulse-width modulated (at least not unless they’re dimmed, and dimming a cheap LED is asking for trouble).
They are deeply modulated at 2x the mains frequency because they use a very simple drive circuit that lights them up whenever the absolute value of the input voltage exceeds some threshold.
I'm a little baffled that GM continues to do this even on later models. I can pick them out a long way away, at night especially. It makes their cars look cheap and possibly dangerous.
It's odd that I/we notice it more on their high-end nameplate (Cadillac), where they theoretically have more money to address these sorts of issues.
I haven't taken notice of the brand, but I certainly have also noticed a few cars with horrible PWM. It really does look bad I think.
I miss how amusement parks looked at night when I was a kid, all bathed in warm, colorful glowing lights. They are still bathed in warm colorful lights, but half of them now have shitty PWM.
Usually tail lights are made up of a matrix of LEDs. They could dim them by only energizing a checkerboard pattern of half of the matrix (using flat DC, not PWM), then energizing the whole matrix when the brakes are applied. If the PWM duty cycle is less than 50% for some reason, then they could energize that portion of the matrix instead.
I am sensitive to PWM, but not CRT's (I have an old Sony CRT I use to play retro games). The reason is that CRT's do not turn the entire screen on/off like PWM does, they draw scanlines. This isn't nearly as bad as what PWM does. It's the on/off of the entire screen rapidly that is the issue.
In fact there is research being done in the retro gaming scene of using CRT-like scanline drawing to mimic what CRT's do for modern displays. This allows "blackframe like" insertion without the flicker. Only issue is you need a very high refresh rate display to take advantage of it and there aren't many of those.
If it’s as low as 240hz, anyone will see a stop motion effect by waving an open hand in front of the screen at 50% brightness.
I’m curious if this is a harmonic mode for a high speed PWM where pulses are either not even widths or the driver loses some power at the 240hz cycle. May perceive similarly.
I have a couple windows laptop workstations with high dpi OLEDs (one with 240hz refresh rate) that I love and don’t perceive this so I’ll have to check.
I have one of these laptops, I tried waving my hand in front of the screen at 50% brightness and I don't observe anything unusual.
I think I am pretty insensitive to this effect, though. Other than occasional seeing a bit of 60 Hz flicker out of the corner of my eye from Christmas lights, automotive LED tail lights, etc. I don't tend to notice flicker.
I'm surprised by Apple putting out a laptop display with slow PWM. That's the kind of detail Apple has a reputation for paying attention to when other companies don't.
Apple has been using low PWM screen for nearly a decade on iphone and ipad now. There’s just been limited demand to improve this in the market outside of china.
There’s also trade off to high pwm, usually worse color accuracy. But at least give us a toggle!
Apple in 2026 is just like any other manufacturer. They don't care about excellency anymore, the products just need to look good in ads and sell for a high price.
So that’s why Apple continued to offer 5K and 6K monitors which aren’t cheap, are and are the best you can get other than getting a professional production grade type monitor, which by the way cost a ton more, and most people can’t afford them.
The frequency is the frequency. If you have a problem with it, it’s your bad luck because the frequency over the years has been somewhere between 30hz and 120hz thru the years depending upon the use case.
PWM on LCD backlights usually doesn't flicker at all. It's smoothed to reduce the flicker to very low intensity. Which makes the frequency nearly irrelevant.
Apple still making some good products also doesn't disprove my statement.
I'm also absolutely still bitter that they broke the Display Stream Compression in DisplayPort 1.4 to do so, meaning any non-Apple monitor on the planet that worked perfectly in Catalina (like my 4K HDR @ 144Hz monitors) was nerfed.
"Apple worked a miracle, getting the bandwidth to drive a 6K monitor!" No, they just said "fuck you, standards". My monitors were neutered heavily (HDR @ 60Hz, SDR @ 95Hz), hell, downgrading the monitors reported capability to DP 1.2 improved resolution options, though not to where they should be.
As a flashlight reviewer, I consider any PWM I can see by waving my hand in front of a light source (i.e. less than kHz) slow. Perhaps others use a different scale.
I'd be fascinated to see how common this really is. Is it something that affects .0001% of users, more, less? At Apple scale an issue like that could hit millions of people. Given the newness and expense of the product one would assume not that many OLED Macbook Pros have shipped. So it's surprising that this issue didn't come up in testing if we're talking about more than a handful of people.
Given that we discovered in the nineties that CFL tubes were unhealthy for a significant portion of the population at these refresh rates and changed to over 30kHz I would assume the same holds true here. In other words: more than we would have thought.
It's hard to put a number on it (e.g. do people with eyesight problems or headaches actually know it's their display?) and it may also be influenced by other factors. I have used phones with 240Hz PWM dimming for years and haven't had an issue. However, I quickly get eyestrain when looking at e.g. a Samsung S26 Ultra. It's probably the combination of 240Hz PWM, FRC for emulating 10-bit on an 8-bit panel, and maybe the two types of pixels (narrow and wide, for the privacy display) that makes it painful for me.
I can also imagine that lower frequency PWM dimming can be more problematic on a display that covers a larger portion of your sight. Many people also probably use their laptop/computer screen for a longer time without looking away (aside from phone addicts).
This has been an issue for all Apple OLED displays since they came out. I bought the iPhone Mini when it came out but couldn't stand it because of the PWM on the display. I had to get an SE instead which used an LCD display.
I'm one of the ones who is very sensitive to this. I get occular migraines often. It has become fairly difficult to find displays that don't have these problems as everyone moves to PWM dimming on everything. Even lightbulbs are a difficult purchase for the same reason (at least Ikea makes some that have zero flicker and are cheap).
It's likely to impact far more than .0001% of users. I'd put it closer to 12% - roughly the same percentage of the population that suffers from migraines. Granted, the degree of which it impacts the person will vary, but if these displays earn the reputation of triggering them, migraine sufferers will steer clear.
PWM sensitivity has been an issue on the iPhone for a long time, but the prevailing wisdom is that it affects only a small percentage of users, and then only at certain lower brightness levels. Consider it like a food allergy, we don’t rearchitect the entire food supply for everyone around the sensitivities of a few.
That said, I have my doubts about prevailing wisdom being true here.
Apple is pretty bad at testing, they released the first Retina MBP with ghosting that remained for a minute or even more (I had one).
I use Apple products a lot, but one thing I learnt many many years ago, is never buy the first of anything new they do. Most of the time it will be fine, but when it’s not it’s just bad.
A small aside: this is why I truly hate when people argue 'oh well, his only happens in 1% of cases, it's not worth supporting/solving'. With sufficient scale, and even without sufficient scale, it's thousands or even millions of people!
Agreed, that wasn't my point. I wasn't suggesting it's fine if it only affects a small number of people. More confused as to how it could slip through testing if it affects a substantial number - given how few units have likely shipped.
>Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your Phone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.
I’ve experienced the same issues on an iPhone 17 Pro. It took weeks of eye strain until I discovered the cause. Even if a small percentage of the population is affected this might still be millions of people that are unknowingly experiencing unnecessary eye strain or headaches from this
Single OLED takes a dive within a year which is why Apple went with Tandem OLED which mitigates some of the weaknesses but it costs more, particularly as the screen gets bigger.
LCD most certainly has color degradation. About 8 or 9 years ago I was able to compare a almost brand new surface pro 5 to my 3 year old one. I was shaken by the difference in difference.
Don't forget the OLED stutter on slow moving scenes because of sample-and-hold. It's why motion interpolation (soap opera effect) exists. I can't watch OLEDs because of it. Looks horrible.
The soap opera effect has nothing to do with OLEDS.
It is to do with higher framerates on movies than we are used to, making movies look like cheaper filmed tv shows. Not a specific display technology working differently.
Peter Jackson famously had this issue when trying to show The Hobbit in 48fps, and that was in projectors in theaters.
Notice on the wikipedia page for 'Soap Opera Effect' it doesn't mention the term OLED once.
I was expecting to read this and learn that the display was reasonably engineered and that there is some small subset of people who have extreme PWM sensitivity who have problems. But no, Apple modulates at 240Hz, according to plenty of articles.
We’re no longer in the dark ages of flicker. There’s actual industry guidance: IEEE 1789. And 240Hz, at any respectable depth of modulation, does not meet the low-risk limit, let alone the no-observable-effect limit.
I am wondering whether this is actually just an amazing firmware goof: the reports seem to suggest that operating at full brightness mitigates the problem, which makes little sense for an OLED display. An OLED showing 50% (post-gamma) gray ought to drive the pixels the same way as an OLED at 50% brightness showing white. And this display supports HDR, so even 100% brightness white isn’t really 100%.
I’m wondering if a little engineering mistake snuck in: some (most?) LCD displays dim by PWM-dimming the backlight, and plenty of backlights have current-to-light transfer functions that inherently low-pass filter the light. If someone naively ported the same logic to an OLED (which doesn’t have a backlight), they might have implemented brightness controls by applying a 240Hz envelope to the pixel excitation waveform. This makes no sense at all as an actual implementation, but I can totally see an AI doing it and writing tests to validate it :)
Even if there is a genuine engineering factor that requires low frequency PWM, I bet Apple could mostly mitigate the problem by deliberately mismatching the phases. For decades, pre-LED stadium lights had rather extreme flicker at 120Hz, but it was tolerable because the overall system was engineered to roughly evenly split the lights between three electrical phases, giving an effective modulation depth near zero.
I haven’t seen one of these displays myself. I find 120Hz flicker to be extremely obvious and very very unpleasant, and if these displays really do modulate in a nasty way at 240Hz, I expect I’ll be able to see it, albeit rather less obviously than at 120Hz. Also, pretty much any modern phone can see this in slo-mo video mode :)
Wait... so operating at 100% brightness mitigates this? I bought this mac and have been reading about this. Stare at computer 15+ hours a day coding, but I also never use anything less than 100% brightness.
PWM is usually only used for dimming. So at 100% brightness there is no PWM being used. I'm not sure how this apple monitor works, but that's the basic gist for most screens that use PWM for dimming.
But the monitor specs show 1000 nits sustained and twice that as the peak, so that means that some PWM is required at 100% brightness, or peak brightness is somehow "over-driving" the panel?
If it’s the “hybrid” design I mentioned later in the thread, then it could be that normal white is simply driving less than maximum current through the pixel regardless of the envelope duty cycle.
If you have a modern-ish phone to go with that Mac, try taking a slo-mo video of your screen (preferably with content with decent sized patches of something other than black or dark gray) at different brightness settings. Maybe even make a big gradient and display that at various brightness settings.
Unsurprisingly, 240Hz is not actually recommended (at least that’s what I get from the abstract, and I’m not about to pay to read the rest of it).
And, in an IMO pathetic example of how the US patent world works, there are apparently patents on obvious architectures like using a fast PWM clock and then discretizing the VRR frame interval to multiples of the PWM time. I thought of this myself about 15 seconds after contemplating that VRR was a complication and then I searched for it and immediately found two patents. WTF!
I had to return the Steam Deck OLED and LCD because their displays PWM was burning my eyes out. Sore eyes for days, having problems to focus properly. I hope this is a learning process and it will get better from the manufacturer side. But I hoped that after my personal Steam Deck fiasco as well.
I thought OLED was superior the bee’s knees, but not at all are equal, single OLED is subject to burn-in and longevity problems, but tandem OLED is supposed to fix both of those problems. Tandem OLED is also a more expensive screen, the bigger it gets oh well. (It’s a great screen on the iPad M4 Pro). That’s the way the cookie crumbles?
Another alternative, that Apple offered on their desktop screens was simply a higher resolution 5K or 6K XDR screen, which are some of the better screens you can get on a desktop computer depending upon what you are using it for, and I don’t mean to play time wasting games.
Single OLED in particular despite all its problems, is the favorite of gamers in the PC world. The previous screen, Apple offered actually is a better screen top to bottom… I prefer the 6K XDR but it and 5k despite being great screens have never been cheap. (the Internet is filled with people crying about the price most of whom thought Apple should sell it at the price of a cheap 4k screen). You got what you paid for which is a great Apple screen.
I had the same problem when the switch from CRT to LCD screens happened. I would get very dizzy when using them for a longer period of time. Other people looked at me funny. A lot of the LED bulbs are also flickering and can cause this issue. You can use the phone camera in pro mode to change the shutter speed to something like 1/8000 and it will show you the flickers.
Recently I switched from a 1440p IPS display which had no visible flickers on camera to OLED which has the flicker and the issues of headaches and dizziness came back. I can sometimes get used to it, but it's still straining more than the previous display did.
Yeah 240 is not a lot. I'm very happy with my new Honor phone that does pwm much better than Samsung. It does more than 2000Hz and way more than my Samsung around 480 I believe (or 240 even? I don't know). My Samsung watch 7 is especially bad, I can literally see it flicker, it's terrible. I take it for granted because a smartwatch isn't something you spend hours staring at. But a phone with that frequency would be unusable for me.
Ps the reason DC dimming isn't used so much is because at least with white LEDs the color temperature tends to change when the DC level changes so it's complicated to calibrate the screen accordingly. In particular the screen gets warmer at lower settings. This can actually be welcome because these settings will be used more at night and a lot of people prefer warmer settings then these days. But it's something that the user should be able to control.
Is this something one would notice if they don't have problems with OLED phones? I was a bit worried reading this...and then realized I was reading it on a Pixel 8 on low brightness. Did a search and found reddit comments like: "Google pixel 8 is the worst when it comes to pwm. It has a frequency of 240 hertz which is the lowest in the industry." [1] I haven't noticed unusual eyestrain using this phone, so I'm hoping a new Macbook Pro screen also would be fine, despite its larger size.
Back in the CRT days, it always bugged me when a display's refresh rate was down at 60 Hz, but otherwise I think I'm not too flicker-sensitive.
I know that each one of us has different peculiarities about screen quality (some care more about colors, others about refresh rate etc).
My personal feud with OLEDs, is that even at very high resolution the fonts do not look as smooth and creamy as the equivalent IPS. It is like I can tell apart their subpixels.
For example I prefer text on my old iPhone 8 compared to my iPhone 17.
Which is why Apple stuck with 5K and 6K monitors/screens and 60hz phone screens, but in recent times, computer gamerboy crybabies have insisted upon 120hz. Apple basically was last man standing, they still sell the 5K@60hz XDR monitor.
Luckily I was at the tail-end of CRT monitor times. I remember I would have to set them to 75hz because I could actually see the 60hz flicker and it would give me headaches and make me feel ill. I still have monitor sensitivity today, PWM absolutely gives me headaches and severely dry eyes. Even on my M4 MacBook Air with DC dimming, I use have to use the stillcolor app to disable temporal dithering. https://github.com/aiaf/Stillcolor I don't think an OLED monitor will ever be an option that works for me.
macbook pro displays (before the oled) have always caused a weird sort of eyestrain and become hard to read after a few hours of usage for me. i have never pinned down exactly what causes it- some internet threads talk about "temporal dithering" complete with weird extensions that may or may not disable it. sometimes i wonder if it's the glossy display (although oddly sometimes it appears to affect me with external displays). i don't know if it's the glare from the gloss, the antialiasing of the fonts or something about the refresh? i have played with all the refresh rate "pro-motion" knobs, it doesn't seem to matter. many of my thinkpads have used pwm dimming, so it's not that. it has been an issue for me on both intel and aarch macbooks.
it would be interesting to get a high speed camera and see if there's a difference in the temporal dimension as well as a careful analysis of the font rendering. it would be funny if there were some kind of metamer noise in there or something that only some people have sensitivity to.
i would also be curious if the matte display option solves it (or has solved it for anyone else).
Seriously cannot believe the PWM frequency is 240Hz. I was shocked out of my mind when I first saw that. It needs to be on the order of kHz to avoid eyestrain for a very significant proportion of the population. Did Apple just forget about accessibility, or did they underestimate it?
PWM frequency is not selected in a vacuum. The maximum is set by your transition time which is set by a bunch of other engineering decisions. It's possible that something about tandem OLEDs make them more difficult to drive faster edges on.
Do slower pixels prevent you from using a higher PWM frequency? Wouldn't that make them like a capacitor smoothing out the high frequency signal into a constant one, like in a Class-D amplifier? That would reduce strobing even more!
Slight aside. I was thinking of buying a Google Pixel 11 but I learned that they have the same problem. I will go into a store and see if the Pro version (which can do 480 Hz) is OK.
Even if I'm not sensitive I am wary of this, what if it causes subtle eye strain that has long-term consequences?
I Think Apple gets progressively worse and worse and I mean in a general way. There are some anomalies there and there but overall the direction is a slow decline in details and quality.
I love me some high end electronics that doesn’t feel cheap but soon it will be not worth it.
It’s still many times cheaper to overhaul Apple than to start another company from scratch.
They still have the right ethos, philosophy and past traditions engraved in the History of the company. Someone just needs to remind them what are they supposed to be doing.
And I don't mean gamers as in someone who plays video games but a more cultural term for a certain group of people that should be ridiculed and ostracized.
Honestly, it may be that the biggest pro of a MacBook is that it feels a world away from gamers and their constant insufferableness, creating a natural barrier.
We should quarantine gamers to windows and lock up the exit doors.
The problem isn't the flicker directly (240Hz is above the flicker fusion threshold), it's the phantom array effect when you move your eyes. Static images transform into a series of overlapping images, and this can be annoying and distracting. It's visible well into the kilohertz depending on how strong your saccadic masking is. I can personally see PWM up to about 10kHz (tested using a strobing LED).
AFAIK, all OLED displays have PWM flicker, and for this reason I stick with LCD, where flicker-free displays are available (although PWM flicker is present in some LCD displays too).
It's not about whether you can "see 240Hz". CRT phosphors have sustain, while OLED does not. The fully-on, fully-off cycle, if infrequent enough, causes some sort of visual stimulation that some brains absolutely do not like. You don't have to see it to feel it.
Sometimes I can tell flickery fixtures because they just "feel more staticky". I don't get visual eyestrain or nausea though.
Other than some old monochrome CRTs, all CRT phosphors decay too fast to prevent flicker. You get some softening of the trailing edges of the phantom array images, but they're not actually blurred together like on a sample-and-hold display. And even the fastest CRTs have fairly low refresh rates, making it more obvious.
What exactly do you mean by "not the same thing"? Using a device means moving your eyes, among other things. I don't exactly stare at a specific point on the screen for the 63 Hz visual persistence to take effect and I'm pretty sure 95% of the other individuals of this world don't do that either
OLEDs commonly flicker at some small multiple of the refresh rate because they often use something somewhat similar to DLP bit-plane modulation to avoid non-linearity at low brightness. You can't do that at xy kHz because that would require xy kHz scanout to the panel, which is physically ... not very plausible. You can gate drive current, but then you're back to how a 2010 LED backlight operates.
TIL there’s a pretty serious downside to OLED. Love the contrast ratios but not this.
I’m not super sensitive to flicker but can be annoyed by it. I’ve used OLED phones but it’s probably not as annoying on a small screen than one that covers more of your visual field.
If you go in a dark room and set the brightness of an OLED phone to minimum and then just swing it around in front of your eyes you're very likely to see a stroboscopic effect. For iPhones this seems to become noticeable below about 20-30% brightness.
I got sensitive eyes and can sense even previous gens' pwm at 15kHz. At 240Hz, I can probably see the pixels turning on and off! Only joking obviously. But I can definitely perceive the unstable luminosity. I can easily spot the OLED screens from 15ft away.
Definitely not going to upgrade. Sadly, this is most likely going to be the standard for Apple going forward.
Looking forward to the price going down and perhaps a good refurbished deal.
The only use case I can think of for this machine is testing iOS touch interactions without a physical phone. Just this one specific purpose and it's not one that would require prolonged use.
It's not just cultists - millions of MacBook users want the lightest, longest lasting, best looking MacBook Pro they can get. For most of those people, this is that laptop, and touch is secondary.
If Apple had released this exact machine without touch it would still sell just as well.
Most won’t use it. Steve Jobs was right, everyone is frisky at the beginning of the day and may use it a few times, but as the day goes on you’ll quickly get tired of it, particularly at the angle a standard laptop monitor sits at, and making a laptop with the screen sitting flat is utterly ridiculous.
Interesting it seems hard to find any research that concludes 240hz or higher frequency flicker causes physical discomfort. Is there a single paper that concludes this? Older studies were based on ~100hz fluorescent lighting.
In a rigorous blinded comparison, would the new OLED MacBook cause more physical discomfort than the mini-LED model? How to explain all the symptoms being experienced?
What’s most likely?
1. Real MacBook hardware issue
2. Nocebo. Expectation of PWM problems > real physical symptoms
3. False correlation. Real headaches/eyestrain but from other causes
How surprising would it be if the answer is not (1)?
Latest iPhones have similar issues with PWM. Does Apple ignore these display issues? I assume it is not a priority given their engineering teams could find solutions.
Given that my phone still suffers from burn-in even though the industry keeps alleging that it is "a solved problem" + given that people adore macs for them being usable for a decade or so, the choice of OLED for a laptop like that seems weird.
It's interesting but unsurprising that now _more_ technical issues creep in, given that the whole idea fundamentally was flawed. If given the necessary technical scrutiny, it would not have happened. Hence, that must've been disabled. Hence other such blatant oversights like this one became much more likely, given that any voice saying "dumb idea" was already pacified.
I of course have no idea how this actually went. I am just claiming that my headcanon is canon.
The shell is 1:1 to a mbp. I predict the following things will happen.
Water damage- folks using their semi dry hands to touch the screen- that water is going to drip straight down to the logic board!
Injury- those sharp corners at the top of the keyboard are just waiting for a power user to swipe.
Screen separation. Touch screens were made with durability in mind- the hinge on the touchscreen mbp is identical in range to the stock mbp. Can’t wait till gen 2
i could not use OLED screen for programming and > 4h screen time a day. too much strain on the eyes. i have LG Gram laptop and it has really good IPS 2560x1600 panel with great color coverage. but it's hard to find a good laptop with IPS screen today as OLED is almost everywhere now.
I am not particularly sensitive, but switching the ipad pro for the oled model, I just don’t like the screen that much, and it is hard to put the finger on why. Side by side, the screen has better blacks and peak brightness and I am sure it beats the LCD empirically on many metrics. But I don’t like the colors as much, and perhaps subconsciously, the flicker is turning me off.
IMO this is very typical of modern Apple. Doing something amazing, but nerfing it ever so slightly so that its just not as great as it could be. I feel this started around the time of the butterfly keyboard issues and terrible cooling solutions on the last intel macs. It just doesnt seem to be getting better, there is nothing they release now that just wows everybody full stop with no comeback from anyone.
somewhat relatedly, i would just like to raise awareness of coil whine for those sensitive enough to hear it. i wish high-frequency tonal noise was also disclosed in the specs, if not part of QA...
On the one hand, I have never heard anyone complain about the 24hz flicker of a film projector.
On the other hand, half rectified LED christmas lights have noticeable flicker to me and can make me feel irritable and woozy.
My question is, when it's trivial to create a PWM circuit that switches at 20khz or higher, why do manufacturers continue using anything in the 60-500hz range that people seem to notice and complain about? Do they save 2 cents or something?
PC gamer here. I love my OLED tv but will never use one as a gaming monitor. They just suck at it.
In a year you will get normal Apple users start showing us burn in on their Macs, and its not going to be a good look for Apple. I guess this is why they made the full lid of the laptop much easier to replace in this generation, they are going to need that when people start wanting their burn in fixed in a year or so.
This is one of the worst articles in terms of information per word density! Too many words and so much beating around the bush before it even discusses what the heck it's talking about.
>We don’t know why Apple has ended up with this particular dimming behaviour
We do. This is more shortseller scamming and market manipulation. They lay their thesis out in this sentence:
"Bad customer experience is usually Apple’s Kryptonite."
The entire domain macanorak.com is shortseller fraud/scam, just like the fake emails pretending to be Jensen Huang's board of directors. His board is furious.
The shortsellers are trying to triple up on their scam. (They tanked Nvidia's stock by 20% in 5 days, wiping a trillion dollars off of its valuation, so now they want to triple up on their fraud by doing the same thing with Apple.)
This is criminal fraud. A quick read through of this domain is all it takes to see through the scam.
You are hereby requested to list your affiliation and any financial interests/positions by your reply (or as an edit/addendum to your comment) as part of a criminal probe.
> But some people are particularly sensitive to this kind of modulation and can experience eye strain, headaches and other forms of discomfort when looking at displays that use it.
So that tiny fraction of users would be well served with some other display and can either return their MacBook or use an external monitor if and when they find out that they're in that cohort.
When I actually went to the source for the 240hz claim, I didn’t reach the same conclusion as the testers?
Maybe they just let their rigol scope spit out 240hz, but 480hz worst case and I would actually say 960hz. I think what’s happening with the tandem oled is they both pwm at 480hz and 180 degrees out of phase giving effective 960hz when both are in use. Which appears to be most of the usable brightness.
Edit: I’m so confused.
“The PWM behavior is interesting, because we can see DC-dimming for all brightness levels. Usually, OLED panels use DC-Dimming only at higher brightness levels. The frequency is very low at 240 Hz, however, and this might be an issue for sensitive users, despite the DC-dimming. ” https://www.notebookcheck.net/Amazing-OLED-panel-Apple-MacBo...
You’re right - looking at the scope pictures, the horizontal period of the grid is 2ms, and the period of the wave is just over that.
A 240Hz wave would have a period of 4.17ms. 480Hz is 2.08ms. Much closer to the oscilloscope waveforms. And even then the waveforms are periodic, with smaller troughs at every second dip.
I wish I could see their test setup. It would be ironic if the panel was fully DC dimmed and the troughs were from another light source or something…
I’m not sure why the scope is saying 240 though. It makes me doubt my understanding :-/.
[Edit: Ah - got it! It’s measuring the frequency of the very lowest points - the ‘every second dip’]
Just adding a note to future readers: frequency is correctly measured dip to dip or top to top. Or every second time a particular value is reached.
> Or every second time a particular value is reached.
The value is waving, so a complete cycle is when it got back to where it started: that is, not just its value but its _direction of change_ is also the same.
(A value waving in 3D could coincide with its start value multiple times before it completes a whole cycle.)
The difficulty here is that it's 480Hz top-to-top, but there are two definitions of dip-to-dip depending on if you count every 'dip' from 100% (480Hz), or just the ones that reach the lowest voltage ⃰ (240Hz).
⃰ ⃰(brightness - presumably the test setup is an LDR or something?)
Here's my hypothesis: I'm guessing that the reviewer is using some kind of photodetector that is sensitive, to different extents, to different portions of the screen. And that the actual display modulates at 240Hz but that some portions of the screen are 180 degrees out of phase with other portions. Or that one of the subpixel colors is out of phase with the others. This could explain the weird alternating-depth signal at ~2ms intervals.
Here's notebookcheck's review methodology:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/How-does-Notebookcheck-test-la...
And the sensor they use might be this one:
https://www.thorlabs.com/item/PDA100A2
That doesn't look like it's even close to being able to focus on a single subpixel or even a single row without additional optics.
In any case, the 0% and 25% waveforms look pretty bad. In my experience, light with sharp, short pulses (like "driverless" LED lights produce) are unpleasant, but the unpleasantness is related to how bright the source is compared to everything else in the field of view. (The 0% and 25% waveforms are solidly at twice the frequency of driverless LEDs, which will make the effect considerably less bad.)
I like this hypothesis! It sounds very plausible.
Surely someone on HN has the equipment and curiosity to double-check all this as a Sunday afternoon project?…
Older samsung galaxy phones (till ~S21) had HW 960fps mode where it recorded 0.2s on sensor before switching back to normal fps. It is not macro, but maybe it could show the flicker rate of the whole screen or halves out of phase.
It would be entertaining to bring a serious high-speed camera with a macro lens to the Apple Store :)
Their method is a photo detector driving the oscilloscope, right?
How can they assume the rise/fall slope in those plots is characterizing the driving electrical signal? Wouldn't a PWM driver be able to have much faster transitions and look more square than that at these time scales?
It makes me wonder if this is the response of the organic phosphors and the difference in apparent "depth" of the dip is really just a difference of duration, since the dips are very V-shaped, rather than bottoming out.
It is slightly odd that it has this paired rhythm, but I don't think you can assume it is "DC-dimming" rather than just PWM quanta that are being anti-alias filtered by the phosphors and measurement methodology.
Isn't it the other way around? They're claiming it's PWM, not DC dimming - DC dimming would be smooth, this isn't.
And tbh I don't think the PWM driver is particularly interesting, nor are they claiming to be measuring it. The display itself is flickering, which is what they're measuring and what the problem (for some) is.
The quoted text claims "dc-dimming" because some of the pulse "dips" do not reach the same detected photon level as the "off" screen state.
I'm glad that this is bringing attention to flicker sensitivity.
Here are some other things that people are sensitive to: - CRI on white LEDs (and flourencents). CRI is how clean the spectrum is in comparison to the sun or a incandescent bulb, where the specturm is completely even. There are some CRI >=95 LEDs that are fine for most people however.
- Motion blur Motion blur on LCDs (such as ~50% of Nintendo Switch 2s) can hurt eyes trying to keep track of what is going on.
Also flicker on bad LED lighting. A lot of bad LED lighting flickers at ~60Hz. In rooms lit by that, you can wave your hand or a thin object back and forth, and if you look carefully, you can perceive a "shutter" effect where you're only seeing the snapshots of its position where the light is on.
The thing that makes that so insidious is that not everybody can easily perceive that.
(The reason why such flicker is common in cheap LED bulbs: they turn AC into DC using a half-wave rectifier, which just chops off half the AC wave. This is also why you can still see the effect in rooms lit by multiple lights, because the flicker is in sync, synchronized to the incoming AC.)
If you are building a space for other people and you are responsible for the lighting, please check for this. If you can't perceive it yourself, find someone who can.
Not everybody can see this, but, if you want to help someone see PWM sources, choose a single color (e.g., red, largely in case the primaries are time separated), make a simple dot or line, and wave it around in the peripheral vision of your doubter.
Humans are very sensitive to flicker in peripheral vision. Have them look at something across the room and then blow their mind.
(Note: easier with a phone, but doable with a laptop.)
> If you can't perceive it yourself, find someone who can.
Or just use your phone’s slo-mo feature to take a 240 FPS video (which then gets played back at 30 FPS). 60 Hz flicker becomes extremely visible. More than once I’ve noticed the strobe effect and then confirmed it this way.
That's a really good idea, thank you.
When I've had a coffee too much, I notice the 120 Hz flicker even more. But even when I'm tired and don't, my mood still noticeably increases when I leave flickery spaces. (I sometimes test my hunch with the slow-motion cam as I am leaving.) I've tried looking for studies to prove or disprove my experience. They should be easy to find, right? Humanity is replacing the entire planet's lighting with LEDs after all! Comment sections have been busy with people arguing about PWM flicker for years, probably longer. What is the best study you can find? For me, it is always the one from 1989 about pre-LED 60 Hz office lighting (that said it had adverse effects). Seriously...?
I wish I was a Bitcoin billionaire, for many reasons, but doing another study on flickery LED lighting seems like the lowest-hanging fruit of our entire civilization. I live in a country that is regulated to hell and back, and yet even our street lights flicker visibly, not to mention classrooms, children's bedrooms, and the screens that people stare at for hours every day. I don't get it.
60Hz flicker is rare. Most cheap/driverless LEDs are full-wave rectified or at least alternate half-wave pixels and thus flicker at twice the mains frequency, giving 120Hz in the US.
Fair enough. 120Hz is really noticeable as well, though, with the same test (wave your hand or a thin object).
> In rooms lit by that, you can wave your hand or a thin object back and forth, and if you look carefully, you can perceive a "shutter" effect where you're only seeing the snapshots of its position where the light is on.
Heh, this is how I test these lamps as well. Also my camera has anti-flicker shutter which can detect it to thwart it by syncing the shutter release with flicker itself. It shows a warning when it detects is, as well.
> Also my camera has anti-flicker shutter which can detect it to thwart it by syncing the shutter release with flicker itself. It shows a warning when it detects is, as well.
Nice! Which cameras do this? And I wonder, how cheaply could a sensor be made to do this, that shows on the screen "there's flicker at 60Hz / 120Hz / 480Hz", if it didn't also need to be a great camera (e.g. it only captured at 480p)?
Mine is a Sony A7-III, the setting is called Anti-flicker shoot. I believe many modern mirrorless systems have the capability.
However, I wouldn't say "oh that's easy", because A7-III has two realtime DSPs, and one of them is directly responsible for things like real-time focusing, face/object/eye recognition and real time tracking, etc. So, I believe that DSP is handling the flicker detection as well.
...and A7-III is the "entry level" member of its generation. higher end models have more computing power than that.
Not all the manufacturers have an automatic setting for this, unfortunately. Nikon being a prime example. They do have shutter speed micro adjustments but it would be nice to have automatic detection.
The bigger issue with their top end cameras (i.e. the Z9 and Z8) is that without mechanical shutters you’re pretty stuffed if you have mismatched strobing from lights, which it turns out is very common. I’ve shot both an opera and a wedding recently where different lights were strobing at different incorrect speeds. It was particularly noticeable on a dimmable stage light in one production - I was sat there for about 10 minutes dialling in exactly the right speed to minimise it.
Yes I can perceive that really well, I don't even need to wave my hand for it.
The power supply is the weak point in LED room lighting. The best power supply for LEDs is switch-mode PWM, high frequency, and with thermal management designed by an engineer who understands therodynamics.
Unfortunately all those things are expensive so you rarely find such bulbs in the cheap bin at Home Depot.
Bulbs are actually a very bad form factor for LEDs, because they concentrate two heat-generating components - the PSU and LEDs - into a small chassis. LED tape with a separate power supply is probably the best solution that's not a full-custom DC light fixture.
It's very unfortunate that our electric codes are based primarily on incandescent lighting. If we were designing electricity from scratch, we'd probably be set up with 240v 3 phase AC for big loads (ovens, heaters etc) and 48v DC for lighting and most electronics. Requiring every device to have its own rectifier is a lot less efficient than putting a single good rectifier in a central location.
> Requiring every device to have its own rectifier is a lot less efficient than putting a single good rectifier in a central location.
Is it, though?
You'd have to deal with additional wiring losses due to the lower voltage between the central rectifier and the devices, and the various individual devices would still need their own step-down converters to turn that 48VDC into something they can actually use.
On top of that: the central rectifier would have to be sized for peak load, while in reality the vast majority of the time it would be running at only a fraction of that. That's not exactly ideal for efficient operation. Individual power supplies can be designed specifically for a single device and operate at its sweet spot most of the time.
> You'd have to deal with additional wiring losses due to the lower voltage between the central rectifier and the devices
No. Everybody always complains about voltage drop. It's not a problem with LED lighting loads because they use so much less power. Let me prove it to you.
Assume we use the same 14-gauge copper Romex for our 48VDC lighting circuit that is already inside most home walls in the USA.
DC resistance of 14-gauge copper wire: 0.002525 ohms per foot.
Voltage drop over a circuit:
Assume we're driving a 13-watt LED bulb (typical 100W incandescent equivalent) that is 50 feet from the supply.Current would be 13w/48v = 270mA.
So the voltage drop is 0.14%. Any voltage drop less than 3% is considered acceptable by NEC.Oh, but what if I want to run more than one bulb? Fine, let's do 10 bulbs on the same 14-gauge supply wire. Now the voltage drop is 1.4%. Still less than half the maximum limit.
And this is 14-gauge wire. What about 12-gauge? Well, that's 0.001588 ohms/foot.
Now for 10 bulbs the voltage drop is eight tenths of a percent.Running LED room lighting in a standard American house at 48VDC on the 14-gauge wire that's already in the walls is completely doable.
Yes, we still need constant-current supplies in or near the bulbs, and those are not 100% efficient. Keep in mind also that some of that 13 watts we assumed above is for typical Home Depot 120VAC bulbs that have builtin rectifiers and [probably] crappy power supplies, so the waste power used by the constant-current supplies I'm talking about here -- which are simpler than the supplies used in Home Depot bulbs -- is probably less.
DC doesn't buy you that much for electronics. You still need to do DC-DC conversion to 12V or 5/3V for the electronics itself.
And to avoid ground loops, you also need fully isolated DC-DC converters. So you end up with the same power supply architecture as for AC-DC, saving only on buffer capacitors.
As an experiment, I converted my homelab to 48V DC to operate from the battery directly after my attempts at making a UPS failed. It works, but it's barely more efficient than doing a double-conversion.
I'm now redoing lighting in my house, and _there_ the DC power makes a lot of sense. I'm planning to use commercial-grade DALI, with tunable white setpoint. It uses true DC dimming, so there's no flicker whatsoever.
Manufacturers are selling DC bulb systems these days. Unfortunately, the ones I've seen sell the accompanying rectifiers (which need maybe $50-100 of power electronics inside) for multiple thousands of dollars, and they're DRM locked to the more expensive bulbs by proprietary protocols.
I find the inefficiencies of the old system more manageable.
Where could one find such things if they could afford it?
reading the sibling comments in this thread show how complicated we’ve collectively made it to buy something as stupid as a lightbulb.
+1 on the attention. There are probably so many humans around the world (I'd estimate in the millions easily, assuming this affects even 1% of the population) who get eye strain and headaches from their oled devices (or even "modern" LEDs! Brake lights are terrible!) but never realize the cause.
Btw for anyone wondering, recent "Chinese" phones appear to do a damn good job. I have a recent BBK device, and I run eye comfort mode on 24/7, and despite being hyper sensitive to pwm (my previous oled phone was bad), this is quite comfortable.
Brake lights could be terrible but headlights are much worse because they are always on at night, they got brighter and are pointed to cars coming into the other direction. Furthermore for some reason it seems that newer cars point their lights almost horizontally. It's as bad also when a car is following me. I never switched my mirror in the low reflection position as often as in the last few years.
OLED doesn't bother me much (I'm fine with iPhone's OLED screen even at 60FPS mode), but my eyes hate low CRI, flickery LEDs.
Bottom of the barrel, eye searing cool white LEDs with bad CRI and flicker control makes my life really harder. Low quality florescent bulbs also create eye strain for me.
The best solution I have found is 90CRI, dimmable Philips LED bulbs. They grow warmer as you dim them, and they create a very comfortable environment for me. Also, a big Bauhaus branch in my city uses mixed temperature LEDs to tune resulting color and temperature. Since ceilings are so high, you don't see the lamps and feels like you're walking under sunlight. It's that good, kudos to them.
When I was a kid I learned that the CRT screen refresh rate must be set to at least 60Hz otherwise it looks like crap and is pain to look at. My cousin had his set to some lower value and would claim not so see any issue. His father said "I don't know how these damn kids stare all day long at the screen, I stare half an hour and I get a headache!" because you're one setting away from not having the headache but you won't let me change it because reasons.
My parents have a plasma TV and I can clearly see it flicker, although it doesn't cause any pain.
I had a ViewSonic 17PS-2 that had a 43 Hz interlaced “masochism” mode. I have no idea when that would have been actually useful.
The IBM XGA graphics card - released in 1990 - supported 1024x768 at 43i only.
Sorry for the Amazon link (non-affiliate); it’s where I buy them. High CRI, dimmable, and so far so good, for me:
PHILIPS LED A19 Ultra Definition Soft White Light Bulbs, 4-Pack 800 Lumen, 2700K, Dimmable, Flicker-Free, 60 W Equivalent, CRI95 True Colors, EyeComfort Technology
https://www.amazon.com/LED-Definition-Flicker-Free-Equivalen...
I also have some 75 W and 100 W equivalents, but they get pretty pricey, at least in Bezosland.
These are what I buy, they are great. But I recommend checking locally first. In my area, at least, the government and/or power company subsidize LED bulbs so they're substantially cheaper if I buy locally instead of from Amazon.
On the other end is motion stutter on OLEDs. Because of sample-and-hold, the blur goes away but the image stutters on slow moving scenes instead. If your eyes are sensitive to PWM (mine are) it's quite annoying to watch OLED movement as well.
Is that what I'm seeing on my LG C series? Every so often when I'm watching streaming video, and the scene changes, the action seems to skip frames for maybe a quarter of a second. It happens rarely enough that I haven't narrowed it down to the TV, the attached Chromecast, the streaming app, or the content.
The only setting I recall changing on the TV is the one that stops the soap-opera effect.
Objectively speaking high fps is a better representation of motion. As a gamer I got used to high framerate content very quickly. I recommend biting the bullet, getting over the soap opera connotation, and enjoying all your screen has to offer.
Not it hurts to watch the judder of 30fps camera pans.
I think you're seeing telecine judder. The video's framerate doesn't find the diplay's refresh rate, and the TV doesn't handle it well. This is why my old Pioreer Kuro switched to 48hz on 24fps content, and it was amazing.
OLED sample-and-hold causes blur.
Yup that's it. And that's why they add motion interpolation (soap opera effect) to get rid of it, but then you get the soap opera effect.
This os fairly fixable with post processing in your video player. For non video things, it goes away at higher framerates.
Yes but then you introduce a soap opera effect. There's no silver bullet outside of BFI but that also causes flicker.
I was building a lego set with my son several years ago and at some point (after the sun went down) realized I could no longer distinguish between the green and grey pieces, though it had been obvious under natural light. It was a striking demonstration of CRI.
Metamerism! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)
Agreed. A couple years ago I got a fancy 4k LG OLED monitor (32GS95UE-B, with the improved subpixel layout), and had to return it two days later. My eyes were literally red from strain, which is how I learned I'm likely PWM flicker sensitive (and that too has only a slight 240hz flicker according to rtings).
Now I go purely for IPS and make sure it's flicker-free. I'm really glad the new MBP screens are an extra and not the new default yet.
This happened to me with the exact same monitor model! I generally don’t have issues with OLED screens so I still don’t know what made that particular monitor so evil. I’m not convinced it was completely caused by the PWM, I think it might be related to the matte coating and text fringe combined with the PWM being the cherry on top.
I switched to a MiniLED screen and it all went away. I even tried to keep the monitor for gaming but I can’t last more than half an hour.
Odd. A traditional 35mm cinema projector produces much deeper brightness modulation at a much lower frequency. Were you ever affected by film projection?
Haven’t noticed, though I rarely go to the cinema.
It’s worth noting though that for the monitor it may be used 10+ hours a day, while watching a movie is a one-time two hours - this is also why I don’t mind my oled tv being tiring to my eyes. I do feel it after prolonged sessions, but I don’t use it nearly enough for it to matter.
Color rendering with LEDs is so terrible. And buying proper lights is either close to illegal (e.g. halogens) for efficiency reasons, or high quality LEDs are almost impossible to buy - "call us for quote" and similar nonsense.
The absolutely worst were the default indoor lights in Australia. There must have been some giant shipment of worst possible lights that they purchased to light up every bathroom in the country.
This world wide transition to cheap LEDs stole a lot of joy from the world.
If I search "CRI95 LED" from Denmark, I get lots of results, though almost all from lighting shops/retailers rather than DIY stores. They seem to cost about 2-3× the price of a normal LED bulb.
CRI90 is much easier, most Ikea LED bulbs achieve this.
Not in Switzerland. It gives me 1-2 german shops. Swiss retailers sometimes admit such products exist, but always out of stock. And if you try to do some research and find high CRI lights that test well, those are pretty much impossible to buy.
As someone who’s had a concussion, this is really interesting. For me this is how any screen was to me, not just bright OLED ones. Even more interestingly it’s essentially only screens— backlist posters at the mall (paper with a backlight) still affect it but less so. To me perhaps it’s focusing on something on a screen that does this, but it’s really interesting to see this affect the general population.
It’s also odd to think about lack of ability to concentrate, and I wonder if screens cause this optically somehow but to a less noticeable degree even when less intense than this new one? (Independent distracting contents)
I noticed that adding a severe red filter to all my screens helped me significantly with the concussion and am also curious about that, would that impact the intensity of a refresh perhaps? Is blue light specifically the problem? I’m unsure but have a plethora of subjective experience.
I’m glad for this to enter public consciousness a bit and would love to see more research on the screen itself impacting our brain.
After I had a psychosis (it was still 'active' at the time, in hindsight, but not as severe) I couldn't use a monitor for long, especially not gaming. It gave me immediate motion sickness, or made the headache more severe. Hw was TFT 1080p LCD screen, GPU was probably AMD 7770 HD, since a few years afterwards I replaced that with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 960.
My matte MBP 2010 didn't yield me this issue, but I didn't game on it either; just watched movies/series. A lot of them.
I grew up with CRT monitors though, and these could cause severe headaches. Especially if resolution too high.
> As someone who’s had a concussion,
I am pretty sure an awful lot of people have suffered concussions and have never been diagnosed as such because they never went to ER.
curious; do you mean like a red plastic see-thru filter applied on top of the screen (filtering the backlight too, like those screen protectors), or a software screen effect that makes everything on screen appear red (which on an OLED screen would probably be the same thing)?
red/blue/green detectors (cones) in our eyes use different paths and have different "refresh rates" than luminous intensity sensors (rods), im wondering if filtering to a single color makes the rods take over for visual pattern processing
I am shocked that Apple would release a screen with such a low PWM frequency. Here is a paper showing humans can perceive flicker at frequencies more than double their display’s rate: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07861
It's not even about perception at all. For some (like me) it seems to be related to muscles in the eyes reacting all the time and fatiguing, it seems such muscles can react much faster than our "perception" of flicker, so something like a 10khz PWM driven display still causes fatigue, even though there's no way you can see it. People that get headaches are probably experiencing something different.
The change in that study was dramatically different: they had half the screen black and half white and were flipping which side was which at that rate. Yes, most people could perceive that. The study included 10 participants, all in their 20s. They didn't ask about headaches other observed effects afterward.
The purpose of that study was to show that the traditional fusion frequency, which is in the range of 50 to 90 Hz for most people, is valid only for what it was initially measured, i.e. the threshold where a sequence of complete static images is perceived to consist of continuous movements.
But when some new display technology is based on showing various image fragments at moments shifted in time, expecting that the eye will integrate them over time to form complete images and continuous movements, that may require higher sampling frequencies, up to 10 times higher, due to the interaction with the fast subconscious eye movements.
The study results are not surprising at all, and this is an effect that should be kept in mind by anyone who designs displays.
I'd love for more research to be made into PWM sensitivity, if only to find out roughly how many people experience problems with it.
I've never had issues with it other than when trying to film certain old displays, but then again, I've never had issues with PAL TV sets running at 50 hz interlaced, nor even old PC CRTs running at 60, which definitely was not 'flicker-free', so I'm probably on the far end of the spectrum compared to the PWM sensitive.
It's an easy thing to forget, as with many accessibility features. And it's going to suck to have the nominally best display be one you just can't use if want to not feel like gouging your eyes out.
I do have issues with PWM everywhere myself while CRT was not big issue. I did tinker with refresh rates though. And I think difference is that
1. CRT display phosphors had afterglow.
2. the cathode ray was a dot moving across the screen, that might be easier on eyes than whole OLED screen flashing at once.
I notice PWM all around me all the time. Lots of cheaper LED lights use it, and I see it whenever I move my eyes, also when not consciously looking for it - instead of a blur I see series of lamps as a brief afterimage.
As a child I got headaches from CRT monitors at 60hz and I could see them flicker. I haven't noticed the PWM on modern monitors, but maybe these Apple ones would trigger me?
The cheap LEDs are not intentionally pulse-width modulated (at least not unless they’re dimmed, and dimming a cheap LED is asking for trouble).
They are deeply modulated at 2x the mains frequency because they use a very simple drive circuit that lights them up whenever the absolute value of the input voltage exceeds some threshold.
Chevy/Cadillac tail lights? Hate them. Looks like 60Hz, no idea why such a low frequency in a car.
I'm a little baffled that GM continues to do this even on later models. I can pick them out a long way away, at night especially. It makes their cars look cheap and possibly dangerous.
It's odd that I/we notice it more on their high-end nameplate (Cadillac), where they theoretically have more money to address these sorts of issues.
I haven't taken notice of the brand, but I certainly have also noticed a few cars with horrible PWM. It really does look bad I think.
I miss how amusement parks looked at night when I was a kid, all bathed in warm, colorful glowing lights. They are still bathed in warm colorful lights, but half of them now have shitty PWM.
To be fair, they're grabbing your attention, which is part of the reason they exist.
It grabs my attention in a way that reminds me never to buy that type of car.
Why should battery-powered diodes flicker anyway?
It's usually the cheapest way to dim LEDs.
Usually tail lights are made up of a matrix of LEDs. They could dim them by only energizing a checkerboard pattern of half of the matrix (using flat DC, not PWM), then energizing the whole matrix when the brakes are applied. If the PWM duty cycle is less than 50% for some reason, then they could energize that portion of the matrix instead.
Or they could raise their damn PWM frequency.
They could also use a linear regulator to limit current with no PWM at all, and that would still be pretty cheap. It's probably not as cheap though.
Apparent brightness controlled by duty cycle.
I am sensitive to PWM, but not CRT's (I have an old Sony CRT I use to play retro games). The reason is that CRT's do not turn the entire screen on/off like PWM does, they draw scanlines. This isn't nearly as bad as what PWM does. It's the on/off of the entire screen rapidly that is the issue.
In fact there is research being done in the retro gaming scene of using CRT-like scanline drawing to mimic what CRT's do for modern displays. This allows "blackframe like" insertion without the flicker. Only issue is you need a very high refresh rate display to take advantage of it and there aren't many of those.
Is there any research around this?
Searching just gives me the same “PWM Sensitivity” webpages without any peer reviewed research.
If it’s as low as 240hz, anyone will see a stop motion effect by waving an open hand in front of the screen at 50% brightness.
I’m curious if this is a harmonic mode for a high speed PWM where pulses are either not even widths or the driver loses some power at the 240hz cycle. May perceive similarly.
I have a couple windows laptop workstations with high dpi OLEDs (one with 240hz refresh rate) that I love and don’t perceive this so I’ll have to check.
I have one of these laptops, I tried waving my hand in front of the screen at 50% brightness and I don't observe anything unusual.
I think I am pretty insensitive to this effect, though. Other than occasional seeing a bit of 60 Hz flicker out of the corner of my eye from Christmas lights, automotive LED tail lights, etc. I don't tend to notice flicker.
I'm surprised by Apple putting out a laptop display with slow PWM. That's the kind of detail Apple has a reputation for paying attention to when other companies don't.
Apple has been using low PWM screen for nearly a decade on iphone and ipad now. There’s just been limited demand to improve this in the market outside of china.
There’s also trade off to high pwm, usually worse color accuracy. But at least give us a toggle!
It's very strange because Chinese brands all do this very well
I feel like people have all but forgotten the time Apple shipped a 6-bit display.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1533218?sortBy=rank
https://www.wired.com/2007/05/apple-lcd-lawsu/
Or the decades of models that had high logic board failure rates.
I wonder if there is a trade-off with power usage.
Apple in 2026 is just like any other manufacturer. They don't care about excellency anymore, the products just need to look good in ads and sell for a high price.
So that’s why Apple continued to offer 5K and 6K monitors which aren’t cheap, are and are the best you can get other than getting a professional production grade type monitor, which by the way cost a ton more, and most people can’t afford them.
The frequency is the frequency. If you have a problem with it, it’s your bad luck because the frequency over the years has been somewhere between 30hz and 120hz thru the years depending upon the use case.
PWM on LCD backlights usually doesn't flicker at all. It's smoothed to reduce the flicker to very low intensity. Which makes the frequency nearly irrelevant.
Apple still making some good products also doesn't disprove my statement.
Apple canceled the ProDisplay XDR.
I'm also absolutely still bitter that they broke the Display Stream Compression in DisplayPort 1.4 to do so, meaning any non-Apple monitor on the planet that worked perfectly in Catalina (like my 4K HDR @ 144Hz monitors) was nerfed.
"Apple worked a miracle, getting the bandwidth to drive a 6K monitor!" No, they just said "fuck you, standards". My monitors were neutered heavily (HDR @ 60Hz, SDR @ 95Hz), hell, downgrading the monitors reported capability to DP 1.2 improved resolution options, though not to where they should be.
240 Hz is not considered slow. It is too slow for many people, but it is not in the "slow" range of brightness PWM.
As a flashlight reviewer, I consider any PWM I can see by waving my hand in front of a light source (i.e. less than kHz) slow. Perhaps others use a different scale.
It’s not 240hz. Compare it to another screen with 240hz pwm and wave your hand in front
I'd be fascinated to see how common this really is. Is it something that affects .0001% of users, more, less? At Apple scale an issue like that could hit millions of people. Given the newness and expense of the product one would assume not that many OLED Macbook Pros have shipped. So it's surprising that this issue didn't come up in testing if we're talking about more than a handful of people.
Given that we discovered in the nineties that CFL tubes were unhealthy for a significant portion of the population at these refresh rates and changed to over 30kHz I would assume the same holds true here. In other words: more than we would have thought.
I would say most people are actually sensitive, and report eye strain faster when using a specifc type of display, but don’t make the connection.
It's hard to put a number on it (e.g. do people with eyesight problems or headaches actually know it's their display?) and it may also be influenced by other factors. I have used phones with 240Hz PWM dimming for years and haven't had an issue. However, I quickly get eyestrain when looking at e.g. a Samsung S26 Ultra. It's probably the combination of 240Hz PWM, FRC for emulating 10-bit on an 8-bit panel, and maybe the two types of pixels (narrow and wide, for the privacy display) that makes it painful for me.
I can also imagine that lower frequency PWM dimming can be more problematic on a display that covers a larger portion of your sight. Many people also probably use their laptop/computer screen for a longer time without looking away (aside from phone addicts).
This has been an issue for all Apple OLED displays since they came out. I bought the iPhone Mini when it came out but couldn't stand it because of the PWM on the display. I had to get an SE instead which used an LCD display.
I'm one of the ones who is very sensitive to this. I get occular migraines often. It has become fairly difficult to find displays that don't have these problems as everyone moves to PWM dimming on everything. Even lightbulbs are a difficult purchase for the same reason (at least Ikea makes some that have zero flicker and are cheap).
Tough luck. The gamerboy mentality rules the computer world. Quantity over quality.
It's likely to impact far more than .0001% of users. I'd put it closer to 12% - roughly the same percentage of the population that suffers from migraines. Granted, the degree of which it impacts the person will vary, but if these displays earn the reputation of triggering them, migraine sufferers will steer clear.
.0001% is not nearly millions. They don’t sell [hundreds of] billions of units
Even if they sold 100 billion units, .0001% would only be 100 thousand.
I decided to approximate because I didn’t feel like doing the rest of the math lol but yes even more ridiculous than I said.
I’m all about hyperbole, but that’s a bit ridiculous.
Fair, I suppose I was thinking but not articulating about such an issue affecting all apple devices (ie: including mobile).
PWM sensitivity has been an issue on the iPhone for a long time, but the prevailing wisdom is that it affects only a small percentage of users, and then only at certain lower brightness levels. Consider it like a food allergy, we don’t rearchitect the entire food supply for everyone around the sensitivities of a few.
That said, I have my doubts about prevailing wisdom being true here.
Apple is pretty bad at testing, they released the first Retina MBP with ghosting that remained for a minute or even more (I had one). I use Apple products a lot, but one thing I learnt many many years ago, is never buy the first of anything new they do. Most of the time it will be fine, but when it’s not it’s just bad.
> they released the first Retina MBP with ghosting that remained for a minute or even more (I had one).
I also had one, for probably 6 years or so, and never experienced this.
Iirc some panels didn’t have it, based on manufacturer, but it was a widely described problem.
In comparison to who? certainly can’t be talking about the rest of the computer industry because they’re still standardized on 4K monitors…
Resolution and quality control are two very distinct things and has very little in common with each other
A small aside: this is why I truly hate when people argue 'oh well, his only happens in 1% of cases, it's not worth supporting/solving'. With sufficient scale, and even without sufficient scale, it's thousands or even millions of people!
Agreed, that wasn't my point. I wasn't suggesting it's fine if it only affects a small number of people. More confused as to how it could slip through testing if it affects a substantial number - given how few units have likely shipped.
You're looking at it wrong.
I was going to downvote this, but instead I gotta say, what goes around comes around.
You realize that is a made up quote, right?
What Apple said at the time was:
>Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your Phone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.
tl;dr: you're holding it wrong.
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
I’ve experienced the same issues on an iPhone 17 Pro. It took weeks of eye strain until I discovered the cause. Even if a small percentage of the population is affected this might still be millions of people that are unknowingly experiencing unnecessary eye strain or headaches from this
Have you tried turning on display pulse mode in accessibility?
The whole "OLED is better" narrative... for starters LCD has longer lifespan, no burn-in, no color degradation. I don't ever want an OLED in anything.
> no burn-in
Not true!
I had a first-gen Dell 24" 4K monitor (P2415Q) since 2015 and by 2024 it had visible burn-in of the Windows task bar.
I like my OLED watch. I like the high contrast... it's a small screen but I haven't noticed any degradation over like 4 years.
I've 100% had LCD panels with burn-in, ghosting, and color degradation within the warranty period.
Single OLED takes a dive within a year which is why Apple went with Tandem OLED which mitigates some of the weaknesses but it costs more, particularly as the screen gets bigger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H43wnV-v7V0 Single OLED isn’t good enough long term. (Gamers will however claim it’s OK. 9 hours a day is 3285 hours in a year.
The Gamer Boys are in denial about the inherent weaknesses of single OLED see the comment section.
LCD most certainly has color degradation. About 8 or 9 years ago I was able to compare a almost brand new surface pro 5 to my 3 year old one. I was shaken by the difference in difference.
I don’t disagree with you. Apple still sells a 5K, but people cry about the price. I personally use a 6K worth every penny.
> I personally use a 6K worth every penny.
I have the original 5k Studio Display, and it's been worth every penny.
Don't forget the OLED stutter on slow moving scenes because of sample-and-hold. It's why motion interpolation (soap opera effect) exists. I can't watch OLEDs because of it. Looks horrible.
The soap opera effect has nothing to do with OLEDS.
It is to do with higher framerates on movies than we are used to, making movies look like cheaper filmed tv shows. Not a specific display technology working differently.
Peter Jackson famously had this issue when trying to show The Hobbit in 48fps, and that was in projectors in theaters.
Notice on the wikipedia page for 'Soap Opera Effect' it doesn't mention the term OLED once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect
Not the same soap opera effect. It's motion interpolation, also called the "soap opera effect". Confusing but there ya go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation
Now you're wrong in a different way.
It caused by the frame rate, not the "how" of you got there. Cameras that record natively in 60 fps cause the same effect, without interpolation.
Do LCD screens not suffer from this?
I was expecting to read this and learn that the display was reasonably engineered and that there is some small subset of people who have extreme PWM sensitivity who have problems. But no, Apple modulates at 240Hz, according to plenty of articles.
We’re no longer in the dark ages of flicker. There’s actual industry guidance: IEEE 1789. And 240Hz, at any respectable depth of modulation, does not meet the low-risk limit, let alone the no-observable-effect limit.
I am wondering whether this is actually just an amazing firmware goof: the reports seem to suggest that operating at full brightness mitigates the problem, which makes little sense for an OLED display. An OLED showing 50% (post-gamma) gray ought to drive the pixels the same way as an OLED at 50% brightness showing white. And this display supports HDR, so even 100% brightness white isn’t really 100%.
I’m wondering if a little engineering mistake snuck in: some (most?) LCD displays dim by PWM-dimming the backlight, and plenty of backlights have current-to-light transfer functions that inherently low-pass filter the light. If someone naively ported the same logic to an OLED (which doesn’t have a backlight), they might have implemented brightness controls by applying a 240Hz envelope to the pixel excitation waveform. This makes no sense at all as an actual implementation, but I can totally see an AI doing it and writing tests to validate it :)
Even if there is a genuine engineering factor that requires low frequency PWM, I bet Apple could mostly mitigate the problem by deliberately mismatching the phases. For decades, pre-LED stadium lights had rather extreme flicker at 120Hz, but it was tolerable because the overall system was engineered to roughly evenly split the lights between three electrical phases, giving an effective modulation depth near zero.
I haven’t seen one of these displays myself. I find 120Hz flicker to be extremely obvious and very very unpleasant, and if these displays really do modulate in a nasty way at 240Hz, I expect I’ll be able to see it, albeit rather less obviously than at 120Hz. Also, pretty much any modern phone can see this in slo-mo video mode :)
Wait... so operating at 100% brightness mitigates this? I bought this mac and have been reading about this. Stare at computer 15+ hours a day coding, but I also never use anything less than 100% brightness.
PWM is usually only used for dimming. So at 100% brightness there is no PWM being used. I'm not sure how this apple monitor works, but that's the basic gist for most screens that use PWM for dimming.
But the monitor specs show 1000 nits sustained and twice that as the peak, so that means that some PWM is required at 100% brightness, or peak brightness is somehow "over-driving" the panel?
If it’s the “hybrid” design I mentioned later in the thread, then it could be that normal white is simply driving less than maximum current through the pixel regardless of the envelope duty cycle.
If you have a modern-ish phone to go with that Mac, try taking a slo-mo video of your screen (preferably with content with decent sized patches of something other than black or dark gray) at different brightness settings. Maybe even make a big gradient and display that at various brightness settings.
Slomo is 240 fps. PWM is 240 Hz. how do you expect to see the flicker?
The "99% brightness has flicker" thing seems like a gaffe, but the general approach is common for low brightness levels.
I did some digging, and apparently there are serious designs using this sort of hybrid dimming:
https://www.imec-int.com/en/articles/displays-health-patches...
Apparently brightness consistency between pixels is poor at low drive current, so designers often use a separate PWM envelope to compensate.
And there are even papers studying the choice of frequency, e.g.:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41411543/
Unsurprisingly, 240Hz is not actually recommended (at least that’s what I get from the abstract, and I’m not about to pay to read the rest of it).
And, in an IMO pathetic example of how the US patent world works, there are apparently patents on obvious architectures like using a fast PWM clock and then discretizing the VRR frame interval to multiples of the PWM time. I thought of this myself about 15 seconds after contemplating that VRR was a complication and then I searched for it and immediately found two patents. WTF!
This is bad.
I had to return the Steam Deck OLED and LCD because their displays PWM was burning my eyes out. Sore eyes for days, having problems to focus properly. I hope this is a learning process and it will get better from the manufacturer side. But I hoped that after my personal Steam Deck fiasco as well.
I thought OLED was superior the bee’s knees, but not at all are equal, single OLED is subject to burn-in and longevity problems, but tandem OLED is supposed to fix both of those problems. Tandem OLED is also a more expensive screen, the bigger it gets oh well. (It’s a great screen on the iPad M4 Pro). That’s the way the cookie crumbles?
Another alternative, that Apple offered on their desktop screens was simply a higher resolution 5K or 6K XDR screen, which are some of the better screens you can get on a desktop computer depending upon what you are using it for, and I don’t mean to play time wasting games.
Single OLED in particular despite all its problems, is the favorite of gamers in the PC world. The previous screen, Apple offered actually is a better screen top to bottom… I prefer the 6K XDR but it and 5k despite being great screens have never been cheap. (the Internet is filled with people crying about the price most of whom thought Apple should sell it at the price of a cheap 4k screen). You got what you paid for which is a great Apple screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H43wnV-v7V0 Single OLED isn’t good enough long term. (Gamers will however claim it’s OK. 9 hours a day is 3285 hours in a year.
I had the same problem when the switch from CRT to LCD screens happened. I would get very dizzy when using them for a longer period of time. Other people looked at me funny. A lot of the LED bulbs are also flickering and can cause this issue. You can use the phone camera in pro mode to change the shutter speed to something like 1/8000 and it will show you the flickers.
Recently I switched from a 1440p IPS display which had no visible flickers on camera to OLED which has the flicker and the issues of headaches and dizziness came back. I can sometimes get used to it, but it's still straining more than the previous display did.
Yeah 240 is not a lot. I'm very happy with my new Honor phone that does pwm much better than Samsung. It does more than 2000Hz and way more than my Samsung around 480 I believe (or 240 even? I don't know). My Samsung watch 7 is especially bad, I can literally see it flicker, it's terrible. I take it for granted because a smartwatch isn't something you spend hours staring at. But a phone with that frequency would be unusable for me.
Ps the reason DC dimming isn't used so much is because at least with white LEDs the color temperature tends to change when the DC level changes so it's complicated to calibrate the screen accordingly. In particular the screen gets warmer at lower settings. This can actually be welcome because these settings will be used more at night and a lot of people prefer warmer settings then these days. But it's something that the user should be able to control.
Not sure if this applies to oled too though.
Is this something one would notice if they don't have problems with OLED phones? I was a bit worried reading this...and then realized I was reading it on a Pixel 8 on low brightness. Did a search and found reddit comments like: "Google pixel 8 is the worst when it comes to pwm. It has a frequency of 240 hertz which is the lowest in the industry." [1] I haven't noticed unusual eyestrain using this phone, so I'm hoping a new Macbook Pro screen also would be fine, despite its larger size.
Back in the CRT days, it always bugged me when a display's refresh rate was down at 60 Hz, but otherwise I think I'm not too flicker-sensitive.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1f9j3fi/pixe...
I know that each one of us has different peculiarities about screen quality (some care more about colors, others about refresh rate etc).
My personal feud with OLEDs, is that even at very high resolution the fonts do not look as smooth and creamy as the equivalent IPS. It is like I can tell apart their subpixels.
For example I prefer text on my old iPhone 8 compared to my iPhone 17.
Which is why Apple stuck with 5K and 6K monitors/screens and 60hz phone screens, but in recent times, computer gamerboy crybabies have insisted upon 120hz. Apple basically was last man standing, they still sell the 5K@60hz XDR monitor.
Despite people perceiving this differently your sensitivity can also change over time.
My first computer had a 50 Hz (Hz not kHz) color monitor I spent hundreds of hours in very close proximity with and the flicker did not bother me.
When I fetched the machine from the attic some years ago and tried it I could not bear it for long.
It's hard even for myself to grasp, how my own perception could have changed so much.
Luckily I was at the tail-end of CRT monitor times. I remember I would have to set them to 75hz because I could actually see the 60hz flicker and it would give me headaches and make me feel ill. I still have monitor sensitivity today, PWM absolutely gives me headaches and severely dry eyes. Even on my M4 MacBook Air with DC dimming, I use have to use the stillcolor app to disable temporal dithering. https://github.com/aiaf/Stillcolor I don't think an OLED monitor will ever be an option that works for me.
macbook pro displays (before the oled) have always caused a weird sort of eyestrain and become hard to read after a few hours of usage for me. i have never pinned down exactly what causes it- some internet threads talk about "temporal dithering" complete with weird extensions that may or may not disable it. sometimes i wonder if it's the glossy display (although oddly sometimes it appears to affect me with external displays). i don't know if it's the glare from the gloss, the antialiasing of the fonts or something about the refresh? i have played with all the refresh rate "pro-motion" knobs, it doesn't seem to matter. many of my thinkpads have used pwm dimming, so it's not that. it has been an issue for me on both intel and aarch macbooks.
it would be interesting to get a high speed camera and see if there's a difference in the temporal dimension as well as a careful analysis of the font rendering. it would be funny if there were some kind of metamer noise in there or something that only some people have sensitivity to.
i would also be curious if the matte display option solves it (or has solved it for anyone else).
The article does't mention which models may be affected. Is it all the M series?
Seriously cannot believe the PWM frequency is 240Hz. I was shocked out of my mind when I first saw that. It needs to be on the order of kHz to avoid eyestrain for a very significant proportion of the population. Did Apple just forget about accessibility, or did they underestimate it?
> Did Apple just forget about accessibility
To this day on macOS, the font size accessibility setting only works on first-party apps!
Even when using Apple's own UI frameworks, and using semantic font sizes that do actually scale up and down on iOS / iPadOS
It astonishes me!
PWM frequency is not selected in a vacuum. The maximum is set by your transition time which is set by a bunch of other engineering decisions. It's possible that something about tandem OLEDs make them more difficult to drive faster edges on.
Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i has a tandem OLED with 1200hz PWM.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-Tandem-OLED-panel-in-L...
Do slower pixels prevent you from using a higher PWM frequency? Wouldn't that make them like a capacitor smoothing out the high frequency signal into a constant one, like in a Class-D amplifier? That would reduce strobing even more!
Slight aside. I was thinking of buying a Google Pixel 11 but I learned that they have the same problem. I will go into a store and see if the Pro version (which can do 480 Hz) is OK.
Even if I'm not sensitive I am wary of this, what if it causes subtle eye strain that has long-term consequences?
I Think Apple gets progressively worse and worse and I mean in a general way. There are some anomalies there and there but overall the direction is a slow decline in details and quality.
I love me some high end electronics that doesn’t feel cheap but soon it will be not worth it.
They have certainly been in decline ever since Jobs died. I really hope Ternus can flip it back around.
It’s still many times cheaper to overhaul Apple than to start another company from scratch.
They still have the right ethos, philosophy and past traditions engraved in the History of the company. Someone just needs to remind them what are they supposed to be doing.
But the Gamer-boys said, “OLED was better.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H43wnV-v7V0 Single OLED isn’t good enough long term. (Gamers will however claim it’s OK. 9 hours a day is 3285 hours in a year.
Gamers don't buy Macs hopefully.
And I don't mean gamers as in someone who plays video games but a more cultural term for a certain group of people that should be ridiculed and ostracized.
Honestly, it may be that the biggest pro of a MacBook is that it feels a world away from gamers and their constant insufferableness, creating a natural barrier.
We should quarantine gamers to windows and lock up the exit doors.
Then release Asha Sharma on them.
Ok but who can actually see 240hz?
Like CRTs scan slower than that, and almost no-one could say they could see the pixels being drawn.
Sure you could hear those fuckers, but not see them, unless you had a source of vibration nearby.
Howe much of this is measurable, and how much of it is similar to the Himalayan salt lamp stuff?
The problem isn't the flicker directly (240Hz is above the flicker fusion threshold), it's the phantom array effect when you move your eyes. Static images transform into a series of overlapping images, and this can be annoying and distracting. It's visible well into the kilohertz depending on how strong your saccadic masking is. I can personally see PWM up to about 10kHz (tested using a strobing LED).
AFAIK, all OLED displays have PWM flicker, and for this reason I stick with LCD, where flicker-free displays are available (although PWM flicker is present in some LCD displays too).
I can easily see at least some PWM LED headlights flickering in my peripheral vision (which is more sensitive to flicker).
Fluorescent tubes used to run at less than 100 Hz before scientists discovered that that was unhealthy for many. Now they run at 30-60 kilohertz.
It's not about whether you can "see 240Hz". CRT phosphors have sustain, while OLED does not. The fully-on, fully-off cycle, if infrequent enough, causes some sort of visual stimulation that some brains absolutely do not like. You don't have to see it to feel it.
Sometimes I can tell flickery fixtures because they just "feel more staticky". I don't get visual eyestrain or nausea though.
>CRT phosphors have sustain
Other than some old monochrome CRTs, all CRT phosphors decay too fast to prevent flicker. You get some softening of the trailing edges of the phantom array images, but they're not actually blurred together like on a sample-and-hold display. And even the fastest CRTs have fairly low refresh rates, making it more obvious.
> You don't have to see it to feel it.
It's not magic. :) You DO see it. 500 Hz for the median observer; above 800 Hz for some individuals. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep07861
This paper appears to be about the DLP effect that happens when a strobing light moves across your vision. Similar, but not the same thing!
There is still some ability to percieve strobing at a steady state though, even if the amplitude is reduced by visual persistence.
What exactly do you mean by "not the same thing"? Using a device means moving your eyes, among other things. I don't exactly stare at a specific point on the screen for the 63 Hz visual persistence to take effect and I'm pretty sure 95% of the other individuals of this world don't do that either
Ok, do you have the same problem with DLP projections? because those colour wheels are slow as fuck compared to 240hz,
what about old-timey film projection? thats ten times slower and fully on/off?
OLEDs commonly flicker at some small multiple of the refresh rate because they often use something somewhat similar to DLP bit-plane modulation to avoid non-linearity at low brightness. You can't do that at xy kHz because that would require xy kHz scanout to the panel, which is physically ... not very plausible. You can gate drive current, but then you're back to how a 2010 LED backlight operates.
This: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/Apple/MacB... is perceptually very different from a low frequency low duty cycle PWM you'd get out of a cheap LCD backlight.
All OLED iPhones flicker below some brightness threshold, for example.
TIL there’s a pretty serious downside to OLED. Love the contrast ratios but not this.
I’m not super sensitive to flicker but can be annoyed by it. I’ve used OLED phones but it’s probably not as annoying on a small screen than one that covers more of your visual field.
If you go in a dark room and set the brightness of an OLED phone to minimum and then just swing it around in front of your eyes you're very likely to see a stroboscopic effect. For iPhones this seems to become noticeable below about 20-30% brightness.
I guess I’m not sensitive to it as I did not have this happen. iPhone 16 pro.
I have no idea, but could it be battery usage and their adaptable update frequency, or a combination of both?
Forget, no. Liquid glass? They've abandoned accessibility.
OLED plus dark mode is a way to juice advertised battery life.
Really happy this is getting people's attention.
I got sensitive eyes and can sense even previous gens' pwm at 15kHz. At 240Hz, I can probably see the pixels turning on and off! Only joking obviously. But I can definitely perceive the unstable luminosity. I can easily spot the OLED screens from 15ft away.
Definitely not going to upgrade. Sadly, this is most likely going to be the standard for Apple going forward.
Looking forward to the price going down and perhaps a good refurbished deal.
The only use case I can think of for this machine is testing iOS touch interactions without a physical phone. Just this one specific purpose and it's not one that would require prolonged use.
The Apple cultists are already saying that touch support is just a nice bonus to the OLED screen that people won't use.
It's the best MBP they sell. If I were buying one today, it's the one I would get. I will also never touch my laptop screen on purpose.
It's not just cultists - millions of MacBook users want the lightest, longest lasting, best looking MacBook Pro they can get. For most of those people, this is that laptop, and touch is secondary.
If Apple had released this exact machine without touch it would still sell just as well.
Most won’t use it. Steve Jobs was right, everyone is frisky at the beginning of the day and may use it a few times, but as the day goes on you’ll quickly get tired of it, particularly at the angle a standard laptop monitor sits at, and making a laptop with the screen sitting flat is utterly ridiculous.
Interesting it seems hard to find any research that concludes 240hz or higher frequency flicker causes physical discomfort. Is there a single paper that concludes this? Older studies were based on ~100hz fluorescent lighting.
In a rigorous blinded comparison, would the new OLED MacBook cause more physical discomfort than the mini-LED model? How to explain all the symptoms being experienced?
What’s most likely?
1. Real MacBook hardware issue
2. Nocebo. Expectation of PWM problems > real physical symptoms
3. False correlation. Real headaches/eyestrain but from other causes
How surprising would it be if the answer is not (1)?
Latest iPhones have similar issues with PWM. Does Apple ignore these display issues? I assume it is not a priority given their engineering teams could find solutions.
Does anyone know if this is something that can be addressed in firmware or hardware?
For example, could we overlay a software dimmer while driving the panel at max brightness?
Or would it be possible to tune PWM settings from the OS?
Or would this be possible to tune with a firmware change?
Idk how these things work.
Given that my phone still suffers from burn-in even though the industry keeps alleging that it is "a solved problem" + given that people adore macs for them being usable for a decade or so, the choice of OLED for a laptop like that seems weird.
It's interesting but unsurprising that now _more_ technical issues creep in, given that the whole idea fundamentally was flawed. If given the necessary technical scrutiny, it would not have happened. Hence, that must've been disabled. Hence other such blatant oversights like this one became much more likely, given that any voice saying "dumb idea" was already pacified.
I of course have no idea how this actually went. I am just claiming that my headcanon is canon.
240hz is insanely low.
If you want to use PWM in an application like this you need to start at like 600hz. This is how fast the subfield drive on a plasma TV is.
I have to use incandescent lightbulbs for certain fixtures because I sometimes need a break from engineers who think they are smarter than me.
The shell is 1:1 to a mbp. I predict the following things will happen. Water damage- folks using their semi dry hands to touch the screen- that water is going to drip straight down to the logic board! Injury- those sharp corners at the top of the keyboard are just waiting for a power user to swipe. Screen separation. Touch screens were made with durability in mind- the hinge on the touchscreen mbp is identical in range to the stock mbp. Can’t wait till gen 2
i could not use OLED screen for programming and > 4h screen time a day. too much strain on the eyes. i have LG Gram laptop and it has really good IPS 2560x1600 panel with great color coverage. but it's hard to find a good laptop with IPS screen today as OLED is almost everywhere now.
I am not particularly sensitive, but switching the ipad pro for the oled model, I just don’t like the screen that much, and it is hard to put the finger on why. Side by side, the screen has better blacks and peak brightness and I am sure it beats the LCD empirically on many metrics. But I don’t like the colors as much, and perhaps subconsciously, the flicker is turning me off.
TIL
IMO this is very typical of modern Apple. Doing something amazing, but nerfing it ever so slightly so that its just not as great as it could be. I feel this started around the time of the butterfly keyboard issues and terrible cooling solutions on the last intel macs. It just doesnt seem to be getting better, there is nothing they release now that just wows everybody full stop with no comeback from anyone.
Is this flickering of similar nature as "sport motion smoothing" on TVs which makes every other frame blacked out?
No not really. This flickers within the frame But yes it does offer advantages too in terms of low image persistence.
In my experience, Apple hardware always gets better over time. So, you should never buy the first hardware "innovation" changes that they do.
On the other hand, the first version is always the most hackable.
somewhat relatedly, i would just like to raise awareness of coil whine for those sensitive enough to hear it. i wish high-frequency tonal noise was also disclosed in the specs, if not part of QA...
On the one hand, I have never heard anyone complain about the 24hz flicker of a film projector.
On the other hand, half rectified LED christmas lights have noticeable flicker to me and can make me feel irritable and woozy.
My question is, when it's trivial to create a PWM circuit that switches at 20khz or higher, why do manufacturers continue using anything in the 60-500hz range that people seem to notice and complain about? Do they save 2 cents or something?
Better isn’t always better right away.
I also wonder how it will fare in terms of burn-in. OLEDs are infamously susceptible to burn-in.
Yes, they are. But no one cares in the PC world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H43wnV-v7V0 Single OLED isn’t good enough long term. (Gamers will however claim it’s OK. 9 hours a day is 3285 hours in a year.
PC gamer here. I love my OLED tv but will never use one as a gaming monitor. They just suck at it. In a year you will get normal Apple users start showing us burn in on their Macs, and its not going to be a good look for Apple. I guess this is why they made the full lid of the laptop much easier to replace in this generation, they are going to need that when people start wanting their burn in fixed in a year or so.
This is one of the worst articles in terms of information per word density! Too many words and so much beating around the bush before it even discusses what the heck it's talking about.
Stopped reading after the first paragraph, straight AI slop aimed at SEO
Hard agree. This in particular got me to stop reading the article:
> At 240Hz, the brightness fluctuation repeats 240 times per second; at 14,880Hz, it repeats almost 15,000 times per second.
Was that written for people who don't know what "Hz" means, or who don't know that 14880 is almost 15000?
If only there were some way to see the display in person and see if it interacts with your, whatever problem, unequivocally...
>We don’t know why Apple has ended up with this particular dimming behaviour
We do. This is more shortseller scamming and market manipulation. They lay their thesis out in this sentence:
"Bad customer experience is usually Apple’s Kryptonite."
The entire domain macanorak.com is shortseller fraud/scam, just like the fake emails pretending to be Jensen Huang's board of directors. His board is furious.
The shortsellers are trying to triple up on their scam. (They tanked Nvidia's stock by 20% in 5 days, wiping a trillion dollars off of its valuation, so now they want to triple up on their fraud by doing the same thing with Apple.)
This is criminal fraud. A quick read through of this domain is all it takes to see through the scam.
This is a real issue apple has, though? people have been complaining about this forever
also I (and Opus) couldn't find the short seller scam you speak of on this site. They have positive posts about Apple too?
You are hereby requested to list your affiliation and any financial interests/positions by your reply (or as an edit/addendum to your comment) as part of a criminal probe.
> But some people are particularly sensitive to this kind of modulation and can experience eye strain, headaches and other forms of discomfort when looking at displays that use it.
So that tiny fraction of users would be well served with some other display and can either return their MacBook or use an external monitor if and when they find out that they're in that cohort.