Comment by sheepscreek

Someone was complaining to me that Apple took a long time to add 120 Hz displays to phones. I didn't even know what my iPhone had, turns out it's 60 Hz cause it's a 12 mini. I've used 120 Hz displays before. Cannot tell the difference.

I'm sure there is a point of diminishing returns for display refresh rates, but I can tell you from experience that it is definitely higher than 60hz. 90hz feels meaningfully smoother (on a Steam deck), and 120/144hz (on a desktop monitor in my case) feels smoother than that. Even mouse input latency is perceptibly lower. I've never used a display faster than 144hz but I honestly would not be surprised to discover that one can still tell the difference well past 144hz.

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.

For doomscrolling or watching videos it makes little difference. For an iPad that advertises drawing with the pencil, the latency of the brushstroke is a massive difference between the two. The more immediate feedback unlocks more confidence and reduces a lot of friction.

From what I can tell, it's the thing they notice more than almost anything else. I was recently shopping for a new phone and my brother, who has no interest in tech, kept telling me I need to get the one with it (I forgot the exact term he used, it wasn't 120hz admittedly).

I think Apple has held off 120 Hz for so long precisely because the average person gets a bit of a jolt of "this device is fast, it runs so smooth compared to..." they can't quite immediately place until someone explains it's the refresh rate.

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 would be surprised if >10% of people didn't notice a difference between 60Hz and 120Hz.

Whether the hardware can keep up with Liquid Glass and push 120 frames a second is a different story, of course.

> I can barely get the regular people in my life to nice anything above 30 hz or turning off motion smoothing. I really don't see how any of this stuff matters for most people

"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.

You don't have to know what Hz is to see that scrolling on some devices is smooth and on other (coug..Apple) devices is choppy. 60Hz feels like a decade old phone.

Nobody ever wanted a >60Hz display, but once you've used one it's hard to go back. It's like having a higher-performance car. You're now stuck with paying more just for baseline happiness.

It's probably not actually as hard to go back as we think it is, but holding on to stuff is in our genes.

I think it only really matters for gamers, but seriously, who's gaming on an iPad?! Use a PC or console!

This tradeoff doesn’t exist.

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.

Even on the 120Hz displays, you can choose to cap them to 60Hz in settings.

Phones use VRR displays, they don't always scale up all the way to 120Hz, only when justified by the content.

the irony is that 120hz screens are actually 1-120hz vs constant 60hz which makes it more battery efficient most of the time except for when you're scrolling

What's magical about 60 there? I'd naively think you'd just want VRR and some power saving render rate behavior rather than a fixed target framerate equal to the max framerate for all types of content all the time. The latter gives you neither good power saving nor good experience in most combinations.

I think you missed the point of their comment. The point is they are reducing features (marginal cost difference for them) to provide a worse experience for a cheaper model. I'm pretty sure it's less complicated to have a shared manufacturing process with fewer SKUs than to have two separate displays (if they're even different and not just software locked).

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 suspect they are going to drip feed it through their products as a cheap spec bump (vs adding extra RAM or storage).

The iPhone sells way more units than the iPad, so it makes sense that it's not a feature for the iPad mini yet.

Or this will be an anomaly and they'll drop the base iPhone and keep the E model for the new base, the Air, the Pro and now the Duo.

Usually it's low FPS (if FPS at all) that causes motion sickness. This comes up in VR discussion a lot. IIRC like 90Hz is considered a minimum.

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.

Oh you should try the accessibility feature for that with the little dots on the screen.

Sure, but the parent comment is saying the “matter of time” should be in the past. I wouldn’t buy a 60hz device today.

Apple introduced Tandem OLED there is a difference most of the PC world is still using single OLED with all its shortcomings along with Thunderbolt 4.

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.

To the average consumer, deep blacks will look great in the next Avengers movie.

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'm one of those who can't spot a difference. I've tried to with the mouse trick or scrolling and I just can't see it. I can see the difference between 30fps and 60fps but anything north of 60fps is imperceptible to me. Maybe it's from a lifetime of gaming on toaster specs where I'd scarcely break 25fps.

I think another thing to keep in mind is that there’s probably an element of sensory adaptation at play here. Like when you wear a watch: you notice it at first, and then you don’t notice it on your wrist anymore.

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.

Why? Because.

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.

For movies, 30fps is good enough, but for a screen which you interact with, the change to 120hz is dramatic. And there is no reason why they should not be adding it.

Why? Reference monitors in the production industry aren't.