alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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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 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.
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).
.0001% is not nearly millions. They don’t sell billions of units
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.
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!
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).