Comment by mtoner23
1 day ago
Has any non pro consumer ever noticed a display greater than 60 hz. 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
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.
If you use a 120 Hz iPhone for 6 months and then switch back to your 12 mini, you'll notice immediately.
What you definitely notice between 60Hz vs 120Hz on a phone is the battery drain.
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.
Not for me. I tried out the high refresh rate thing, switched back to 60.. can't tell any difference at all. Same for high DPI vs "regular" DPI screens.
Screen flicker on CRTs with low refresh rates was terrible for me, but with modern flat panels.. nope, can't really tell the difference.
I think this varies a lot from person to person. I find the effect to be incredibly subtle - one of my monitors reset it self to 60hz a while back, and I didn't catch the problem for days.
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If something is not noticeable when it gets "better", but it leads people to notice other stuff is "worse" over time, then I'd argue it's not actually a good thing to get.
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.
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I used to switch between a MacBook Pro with a 120Hz display and a MacBook Air with a 60Hz display and never noticed any difference. I think I could probably have noticed if I'd put them side by side and compared the feel of the scrolling, but why would I do that?
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.
Some people are born with nervous systems which aren’t capable of noticing the difference, just like there are people who can’t see better than 20/20 no matter how good their optical acuity is.
Maybe I'd be able to tell in a blind test if I'm looking for it. Just meant it's not something I'd passively notice.
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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.
I'm sure mouse latency is a big issue for iPad Mini users.
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?
I know you’re being sarcastic with that first line, but touch latency is even more noticeable than mouse latency.
Does the page look and feel glued to your finger as you scroll?
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Not sure about iPads, but going from a pixel 3 to a pixel 5 made me feel like my pixel 3 was broken. Xr to 16 pro was similar, but that is because Xr was legit broken.
The ProMotion screens have variable refresh rate depending on the content displayed. 10Hz to 120Hz for iPhones and 24Hz to 120Hz for iPads. So in theory the power consumption should be even better than a regular screen for static content like reading text.
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Yup. For me up until 90/100ish it's a pretty significant improvement all the way up and after that I don't know if I could notice outside of a fast game or wiggling the cursor over a contrasting color
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
Having seen faster screens, I find 120 is where the diminishing returns ramp up for me. I wouldn’t bother with more.
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.
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 think they made iOS run slower for 60Hz devices. Like 2-3 version ago they changed all the animations and it makes it unbearable to use my iPHone 17 on 60Hz when I used to prefer running my old Samsungs on 60Hz several years ago.
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 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.
notice, maybe, but care, definitely not. there's a reason TV manufacturers get away with leaving on that awful AI smoothing by default.
That argument goes the other way though? The only reason TV manufacturers would leave frame interpolation on by default is that a decent chunk of people notice, those people care, and most of the people who notice are "normal people" who aren't repulsed by it.
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.
> 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.
But in this case, most people really truly don't have an issue with it.
It's a very small minority who cares.
> It's a very small minority who cares.
Cite your sources, please or you're just echoing "trust me, bro".
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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.
If your phone is choppy when scrolling a list on a 60 Hz display, it's not going to scroll smoothly on a 120Hz display.
> it's not going to scroll smoothly on a 120Hz display
It will be buttery smooth between the chops.
My pixel lets me pick between 60 or 120Hz refresh rate, the bump in perceived smoothness is substantial, to the point that 60Hz does appear choppy in comparison.
iOS at 60Hz is so much worse than Android at 60Hz, I don't know why. maybe Apple did it intentionally to sell more iphones
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Phones today have plenty of power to generate 120 screens per seconds. Capping them with a screen is a terrible idea. Smooth form a decade ago isn't the same as smooth of today.
20 years ago I was gaming at 30fps and called it smooth. Now 120Hz feels like bare minimum.
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As someone who occasionally browses Hacker News on a Kindle e-Reader, having a low refresh rate really doesn't matter.
I'd love to have eInk at 90-120Hz. But I agree that 60Hz or 5Hz is pretty much similar expeirience when it comes to scrolling.
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Yeah I wanted to love the form factor of the Mini and thought the 60 he wouldn't be an issue but was reminded any time I used the device.
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.
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 keep hearing this all the time, and I think this is an absolutely massive overstatement that you cannot go back to 60 hz after experiencing high refresh rates.
My personal experience is that I do notice the difference - for like a minute - and then I adjust and never care anymore.
Yeah, we're talking more like reducing the amount of sugar in your tea hard, not quitting heroin hard.
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I think it only really matters for gamers, but seriously, who's gaming on an iPad?! Use a PC or console!
It's worth pointing out that mobile gaming surpasses PC and console combined, in terms of marketshare and revenue. https://playercounter.com/gaming-industry-revenue-statistics...
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.