They should stop handicapping the non-Pro displays at 60hz refresh rate. The world moved on 5 years ago. It’s getting tiring now.
Actually surprised to learn Apple did the OLED swap and didn't use the opportunity to bump it up at least to 90 hz like the OLED Steam Deck.
20 years ago I was gaming at 30fps and called it smooth. Now 120Hz feels like bare minimum.
Outdated comparison now that Liquid Glass is lagging my phone.
It will be buttery smooth between the chops.
60fps is basically fine as long as you are unaware that it can be any better, but once you find out you are forever spoiled by the knowledge.
I'm sure a lot of people now would feel odd if you gave them a 60Hz phone after high refresh has become so common, even if they don't pay conscious attention to that kind of stuff
I know there's a sizable contingent of people who just think a bigger number is better, but realistically this is a device for passively consuming text and video content that is typically around 30 fps anyway. Why waste the battery power on faster refresh?
Does the page look and feel glued to your finger as you scroll?
Try rapidly dragging up and down to scroll a web page.
For some people, it’s motion sickness inducing of it gets too laggy
Yes, for me issues with apps have mainly been in poorly optimized code causing lag, slow loading and the like. The 60hz/120hz thing has never really been a practical issue.
Whether the hardware can keep up with Liquid Glass and push 120 frames a second is a different story, of course.
If only "pro consumers" noticed or cared... well, those "pro consumers" are the ones who think it looks like shit and would rather have a TV without it.
It's probably not actually as hard to go back as we think it is, but holding on to stuff is in our genes.
My personal experience is that I do notice the difference - for like a minute - and then I adjust and never care anymore.
Without this, it'd be very hard for an average user to "feel" a performance difference between an A18 Pro in the Neo and say as far as the M5 Max in a MacBook Pro unless they had a "special" use case which really needed the extra CPU/GPU cores.
Of course, they can't stay forever on that. E.g. with the iPhone 17 they finally flipped the non-Pro over. Probably because it was starting to make the iPhone seem sluggish/stuttery compared to other phones more than it was making the iPhone 18 seem fast. Tablets have never seemed to be as fierce a market in terms of your average Joe comparing them, but I'd expect the same switch to being a liability instead of a tool will happen there as well (if they aren't already late to the game).
I don't know how "mobile" gamers are using iPads (or tablets), but considering the size of the market, I doubt it's particularly niche.
I thought that basically fits the definition of "gamer" so I'm clearly mistaken. How do you define "gamer"? Someone who "always" plays games? (for some definition of "always"?)
Regardless, non "gamer" game players can still benefit from higher refresh rate screens, and they're not insignificant in number.
Mobile gacha/micro-transaction games often encourage frequent/repetitive play (e.g. via dailies, limited time quests etc). Would someone engaging in this likely consider the game to be a hobby?
Not a blind test, but the smoothness when tracking a moving object is very obvious
But maybe it's because I'm 40+ with relatively bad eye vision and 20 years earlier I'd be noticing the difference much more.. But I'd say going from 1080p to 4k was a lot more obvious than that...
But if you really don't want it, Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Limit Frame Rate will cap it at 60.
There's also an option to prefer page rendering updates near 60 hz buried in Safari's feature flags settings. This one defaults to on, presumably to protect the battery life from asshole web developers and advertisers.
Frustratingly, built in Mac displays kinda force enable it. You can at least reduce the max nits to be the same as max screen brightness, rather than the insane "XDR" default where HDR can go nearly 3x the max brightness. You can also make a custom color profile that disables HDR, but this disables the screen brightness controls, which isn't worth.
Convincing them they need more than 60hz is going to be a hard sell.
Imagine if someone said "this food won't really taste better to you when you first eat it, but after 6 months you'll find other food tastes worse". To me, this would not be a selling point.
I've often had new phones that are 'faster' but I barely notice the fastness until I go back to my old phone and realise that my finger-memory needs adapting because things take just a bit longer to load.
I'd assume it's similar for screen refresh rates.
When I got the phones, I did not notice any benefit related to screen refresh. I also did not notice any detriment when I went back to my 13 mini after two weeks on a 120 Hz screen.
But if it was as GP said, and it's only something you notice when you go back to a "lesser" screen, then that would not be a selling point in my book.
"It's sometimes said that glass in very old churches is thicker at the bottom than at the top because glass is a liquid, and so over several centuries it has flowed towards the bottom. This is not true. In mediaeval times, panes of glass were often made by the "Crown glass" process. A lump of molten glass was rolled, blown, expanded, flattened and finally spun into a disc before being cut into panes. The sheets were thicker towards the edge of the disc and were usually installed with the heavier side at the bottom. Other techniques of forming glass panes have been used, but it is only the relatively recent float glass processes that have produced good-quality flat sheets of glass." https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.h...
And I would disagree that only the story matters. If that were the case, people wouldn't go to the theater (a trend that has started happening in the last 15 years as people have been able to rig their living rooms to give an experience that is nearly theater quality, especially when considering cost and convenience. When we had 20" TVs, they were no substitute for going to the movies.
Either way, a larger screen is not the same improvement as higher resolution. And more importantly, the reason people may not go to the movies when they have a home theater system is partly due to justifying the cost of the theater system.
That’s not my memory of it at all. They were often set to 60Hz by default, and increasing the setting to 75Hz would make it noticeably less flickery.
> and now we are trying to do the same? you want to feel headache again?
The headaches were from when it was too low.
The kids make me watch Transformers - completely devoid of suspense or consistency. That 4k 120Hz OLED is the only thing getting me through that gauntlet.
With food also you could be incrementally getting better and better food and when you then try v1 it would taste bad.
It seems that we might also be noticing slight degradation more than slight improvement in general? No idea if that's true.
Conventional film projectors don’t show each frame continuously, they transition the shutter blade smoothly between frames, and projectors often flash each one a couple of times (48 or 72hz). A cinema projector is going to demolish a LCD in smoothness and motion quality even if it technically has a higher refresh rate on paper.
Either way, DVDs were digital 29.97 fps at most.
I don't really get the obsession with smooth movement for desktop use (as opposed to gaming). Possibly this is a generational thing? Why is anyone intentionally using a computer primarily via slow analogue inputs?
Depends a lot on the usage I guess. In a tablet where you may draw etc you can notice the difference definitely. Or if you play games on the phone. But otherwise I don't think the difference is that important as it is sometimes claimed.
There's a minority of people who really do notice stuff like this, which is fine. The problem is that for some reason, they sometimes have difficulty accepting that they're a minority.
Screen flicker on CRTs with low refresh rates was terrible for me, but with modern flat panels.. nope, can't really tell the difference.
Not sure I'd notice it much on a phone.
And for decades we've had people claiming that 30fps is just fine for gaming...
"I don't have an issue with it, so most people also don't have an issue with it"
False Consensus Effect (or false consensus fallacy):
It happens when someone overestimates how much other people agree with them, assuming that their own personal beliefs, values, or experiences are the default for everyone else.
It's a very small minority who cares.
Cite your sources, please or you're just echoing "trust me, bro".
You want them to cite sources for something they can't possibly cite. I'm telling you that you are doing the same thing they are: confidently asserting that you're correct even though you cannot possibly prove that.
It is not a difficult concept.
Where did you see this? The acoustics in your head must be wild:))
Source?
There is an argument to be made on battery life 60-120 but my god i can instantly tell between 60-120. The key part is the input responsiveness more than anything else. If you tell someone to look at “frame rate” few will notice the dif but have them grab a window and wiggle it around, obv dif with responsiveness
If they INSIST that it MUST be 60 Hz, I'd accept the consolation/compromise of 60 Hz but 0ms-ish latency. (Maybe they already do it that way.)
As in waiiiiit until the 16.67ms between frames is almost up while sampling inputs, then bam!, render quicky, bam!, transfer it over a link that could carry more than 60 frames per second, bam!, fast OLED display. Each frame fresh and close to input.
To the why?-sayers: Because the difference is noticeable. We can get all philosophical and discuss whether it's a competitive advantage for someone to not notice the difference, or vice versa. Why the why?, why not just… take us difference-noticers on our word? Like… we're not taking your 60Hz 16.67ms crunchiness away from you?
You didn't convince me.
It's extremely interesting, and I'll be frank here, that people who just can't tell the difference are usually judgy and kind of status- and comparison-oriented towards people. In my experience. Others may not notice that difference.
Like, is the battery running out or is a setting misconfigured somewhere? I won’t spend a dime buying any device that can’t hit at least 90-100hz+
Sounds like you'd buy the RapidWipe 120 wipers. Much smoother sweep, but you'll go through a windshield a week.
/s
Look at Apple’s own smartphone lineup. The Pro models with 120Hz screens get better battery life than the low end iPhone models.
You could make up for the difference in battery life with an almost undetectable amount of extra battery capacity from both a cost and size standpoint.
Do you think they couldn't add a refresh rate control to the device if you wanted to have lower battery? They already have variable refresh rate implemented, a much harder problem.
I remember the age of when Intel used to lock down hardware multipliers for overclocking behind the K versions, and GPUs did too. This is a well known practice, and Apple is not above it.
I could not care less about any refresh rate over 30.
You can care about it, but that just means it sounds like a differentiator to me, not something everyone should pay for just because you care about it.
You will have to somehow prove it if you would say that the panel and driver chip are all already ready to do 100+ hz for free by default, and are actually artificially limited, and that that artificial limitation doesn't come with some other advantage like battery life (allowing a smaller battery or less cost in some other way).
Or, jokes aside, I honestly think that you might just have beefier time-integrating sensory-processing circuits in your brain than I do. Really. I do profoundly notice the difference, and it's a gritty and distracting thing. A slight but persistently intrusive and distracting perceptual thing. I honestly wish I didn't notice, but I do. I basically ask this: believe us when we ask for higher framerates and lower end-to-end latency.
And I'm fairly certain that the hardware and software to do higher frame rates across the board is a baseline commodity in the Apple source hardware ecosystem the build and integrate from. And it's certainly a better fit to consider it a line drawn between "pro" and "not pro" for marketing and pricing purposes than any fundamental and meaningful price-of-equipment threshold.
The iPhone sells way more units than the iPad, so it makes sense that it's not a feature for the iPad mini yet.
I bought the new 8 inch Alexa tablet the other day, and the price was decent but it's a piece of shit. I only wanted it for putting on a video in bed while I fall asleep but it can't even do that because when you drop the brightness to minimum, the display randomly turns off (not actually locking the screen, it's still running the app and active, you can touch stuff you can't see, but the pixels are turned off)
That's...horrifying.
Have you tried closing your eyes?
- Apple introduces OLED and talks about deep blacks and 1200 bits
- Why do they think people care about the above and not 120hz as well?
To the average consumer, neither matters much. True. But the above did not make much sense to me.
120hz at 5k requires Thunderbolt 5 (ie better graphics card, more info down the pipeline.
Which is why most of the PC world is on cheap 4k monitors still.
Most 5K monitors on the PC side are not going to be driven over Thunderbolt, but rather DisplayPort or HDMI.
And the most popular resolution on PC is not 4k, but rather 1080p and 1440p.
Because that market, in aggregate, only spends extra on monitors for gaming.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey for last month, 47.91% of Steam users are on 1920x1080; adding the 2.56% on 1920x1200 means that a majority of users are still on 2K. The next biggest chunk of users are on 2560x{1440, 1600}, at about 32%. Only 5% of users are on 4K resolutions or greater.
And these are gamers, who are more likely than the average user to care about graphical fidelity. Most of the PC world just does not care about 4K, period.
To the average consumer, obsessing over scroll feeling not completely perfect is a distraction from watching the next Avengers movie, if not downright neurotic behavior.
To a prosumer, the value may be obvious but the price may not be worth it. Which can lead to a distaste for the company, for not being a more accommodating company.
To a professional, if you need it, you need it, and you begrudgingly pay for it. Because you need it.
I don’t even know what my phone screen has. Wasn’t why I bought the pro at the time. Wanted the additional ram. So I wouldn’t feel as pressed to upgrade now. (Prosumer, aka neurotic.)
I can spot a 60Hz display from jiggling the mouse pointer for a second.
I’ve also done side-by-side comparisons of full screen scrolling on 60Hz and 120Hz screens for less technical people who could barely perceive a difference when I was pointing it out, but it took some time to get them to see it.
MKBHD (YouTube tech video and reviewer) talks about this a lot: It’s highly valuable to people like you and me who are attuned to the performance of our devices, but most people don’t notice. Or care!
I would appreciate high Hz displays everywhere, but I admit that Apple has probably made the right consumer choice tradeoff to compromise on refresh rate for these lower end devices where minimum cost and maximum battery life are the two most important features for those who buy them.
So if you’re actively moving between a high-refresh-rate device (like a lot of people here with their 144hz monitors) and then one with a lower refresh rate, you’re probably more sensitive (and potentially annoyed) by the discrepancy.
Viewing distance plays a factor too. I realized 4k tvs are useless to me because I can't perceive 1080p pixels unless I'm comparison shopping in a TV show room from 2 feet away (probably why they don't let you experience appropriate TV viewing distances in these spaces in the first place).
I get horribly motion sick playing some games like Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime, or the original DOOM. I run my phone at 120Hz and like it. For games, cranking up the FoV tends to help, also disabling effects like viewbobbing, blur, shaking, etc.
I understand this is not fun to experiment with, though. Once I'm motion sick, I tend to be the entire day, only sleeping fixes it, so I'm not usually excited to keep trying to tweak the thing that makes me sick. I tend to dive into settings before playing any game now. I hate when it auto starts the game to appear cinematic.