Apple Wins Patent for iPhone Display With Variable Refresh Rates Up to 240Hz

[Eckee]

If that was the case, those people would buy phones that were designed that way. Maybe Apple has a firmer grasp on what 99% of the world wants than you do?

People don't buy iPhones because they are thin. Most people buy iPhones because of iOS or because they are fanboys. And it may surprise you but people who are not obsessed with iPhones DO buy phones because of a larger battery or more features like high refresh rate, external USB drive compatibility etc.

My mom bought Samsung M30 because it has great cameras and a great battery with a cheap price tag. She goes trekking and shoots and shares lots of photos/videos, browse social media all day.
And my sister bought an A50 because she uses her phone for work mostly and it was at the sweet spot back then with 1/3 of the price of an iPhone.
They both used to use iPhones.

I still prefer iPhone, because I love iOS and don't like Android even though I know I'd get more features for a lower price with an Android device. And I've been using iPhone since 2012 and all of my stuff is practically in my Apple ID, I also use an iPad so it's a lot harder for me to let go.

But let me tell you, one day someone will make a decent UNIX based OS for phones and collaborate with a major chip manufacturer, like AMD. Then I, and many people like me, will really consider switching.

 

[Blur Busters]

Am I the only one who thinks refresh rate is mostly ridiculous hype? Maybe I'm in the extreme minority here, but I can't really tell the difference between 60 and 120 in the first place. 180 and 240 seem like an overkill "feature" for something that would absolutely annihilate battery life. Aren't we way past what the human eye can detect anyway?

This is like 8k for me. Unless you have a 100" TV, it's all pointless marketing garbage.

It’s mainly visible during text scrolling. Compare two iPads (60 and 120) while scrolling exactly he same webpage. Twice Hz halves motion blur, and quadruple Hz (240 Hz) quarters the motion blur for a sample-and-hold LCD and OLED.

I have a 360 Hz monitor here and it is 1/6th the display motion blur of 60 Hz during browser scrolling.

From my read of Apple’s patent, it appears per-pixel shift registers are a brilliant idea to save battery power per Hz.

It would allow 240 Hz with the power consumption of 120 Hz. You’d have to refresh at 120Hz, but two pixel colors are refreshed ar the same time per pixel. The pixel then autopliots two refresh cycles while the global refreshing electronics only need to address the panel 120 times a second. It would scale exponentially, like 4 shift registers for 480 Hz out of 120 Hz.

Apple is smarter than I expected on this under-the-radar patent. The gaming monitor industry is kicking their asses wishing they had this patent, ai think. Gamers need to double refresh rate to keep punching the diminishing curve of returns (60, 120, 240, 480) for human visible benefits of blue halvings, especially for VR and bigger displays.

VR researchers found that retina refresh rates are in excess of 10,000 Hz, though for smaller-FOV handheld phone displays, human benefits disappear after about 500-1000 Hz depending on variables like stroboscopic-effect sensitivity, wagonwheel-effects, and motionblur-effects.

The patent is brilliant battery-wise, and much needed innovation for power efficient high-Hz. Also theoretically, shift registers could also be used spatially too (not just temporally) for blurfree scrolling (up and down), like CRT motion clarity sample and hold, as clear as moving a sheet of paper vertically.

Flicker (BFI, strobe, phosphor, CRT) will become extinct as a display motion blur reduction mehod. Blurless sample-and-hold is the way to go. Real life does not flicker, and displays (especially VR) should not add blur above-and-beyond real life.

VR is the wright brothers of a Star Trek Holodeck. Holodecks requires ultra high Hz to look like real life (no stroboscopics, no wagon wheel effects, no source based blur, no display based blur, no flickee)

Get where Apple’s brilliance is apparently going?

EDIT: One thing, I do however suspect that Apple will need to scale back certain items in the patent, since there's already prior art more than 3 years ago in the Zisworks 4K 120Hz display, which halved vertical resolution to do 240Hz, and quartered vertical resolution to do 480Hz. I'm also aware of some other prior arts. Some elements such as per-pixel / row shift registers are pretty neat and a battery saving innovation. Nontheless, techniques that allows good efficient scaling of display refresh rates for use cases such as clearer scrolling -- is quite welcome!

 

[Blur Busters]

<HindsightMode>

2024 Update, OLED also massively amplifies 60-vs-120-vs-240 visibility. This is clearly apparent on bigger mobile screens, especially the new OLED 120Hz iPad.

Instead of 1.1x improvement, it became a 2.0x improvement:

On LCD, 60-vs-120 (especially mobile screens without overdrive) is only 1.1x difference to many human eyes because of slow pixel response. The current GtG of Apple LCDs almost doubles LCD motion blur relative to 0ms GtG. While 60-vs-120 on OLED is much more linear scaling (like a true 1/60sec shutter vs 1/120sec shutter).

The motion blur of 60Hz vs 240Hz for mere application scrolling/panning/etc is so dramatic, that TechSpot commented:

TechSpot [240Hz OLED monitor for office use]: "The 240Hz refresh rate at 4K is much better than I was expecting for productivity work. Relative to the 144Hz LCD I was using, the combination of a higher refresh rate and faster response times makes this QD-OLED much nicer to use for everyday tasks."

While beyond flicker fusion threshold, you have scrolling motion clarity that improves with refresh rates very linearly on OLED (similarly to camera motion blur 1/60sec shutter vs 1/120sec shutter vs 1/240sec shutter vs 1/480sec shutter).

(scrolling, panning, documents, maps, browsers, anything that executes a large pan-movement on screen, assuming framerate=Hz smoothscrolling)

OLED refresh rate benefits visibility scales much more linearly rather than tiny-incrementally.

Researchers discovered 120-vs-480 OLED was more visible to humans than 60-vs-120 LCD.
So, 120-vs-480Hz OLED is more like VHS-vs-8K, whereas 60-vs-120 LCD is more like 720p-vs-1080p.

After OLED replaces LCD, apparently 480Hz is not just for games -- it's even ergonomic for scrolling, especially for people who get motionsick by scrolling motion blur (even Reduce Motion doesn't fix that portion)

I think Apple discovered this when they did this patent. Only now in 2024, mainstream writers are now discovering 240Hz is no longer for games, with OLEDs massively amplifying human-visiblity of refresh rates even for plain scrolling.

4K was a $10K luxury and power hog in 2001, while today it's a mainstream feature in cheap TVs and phones are retina resolution with little power penalty. Likewise, high Hz will become more efficient, to the point where it's mainstreamable. It's quite possible Apple found ways to make higher Hz more efficient over the long term, through these patents.

Thus, for OLED-amplifying office ergonomics reasons accoladed above, I suspect the first 240Hz Apple product will be a MacBook OLED, possibly with a future M5 CPU. 240Hz is more ergonomically beneficial to laptop-sized screens than tiny phone screens, since it's a larger field of vision forces more display motion blur into your eyeballs.

The usefulness of 240Hz (in non-gaming) is much more than expected;

</HindsightMode>