Other Eye-strain while using iPhone X and up

[Maven1975]

I have this problem with ALL Apple dispays at this point -- MacBook, iPad, iPhone. I switched from MacBook to Windows (BTW, even with Windows there are some that seem to be doing temporal dithering, e.g. Microsoft Surface), I have never owned an iPad, and I'm on an iPhone SE 2022 that is barely usable. For content consumption (other than "listening" to YouTube videos), I use my Dynabook laptop (2.3 lb, EyeSafe display).

I have been reluctantly stuck on a Windows laptop myself.

Found the best thin a light for my eyes and use case. - Asus X13 32GB/4070.

I really HATE Windows, but have no choice as I need to be able to use it for hours at a time. - Did I say how much I dislike Windows? It feels like one gigantic ad/data sucking platform. Like it’s not even trying to hide it anymore…

Would really like a 14 Pro. Unfortunately, that’s a no go. Now with the rumors of OLED in the refresh, hopes are all but dashed at this point.

 

[dannyh5319]

I have been reluctantly stuck on a Windows laptop myself.

Found the best thin a light for my eyes and use case. - Asus X13 32GB/4070.

I really HATE Windows, but have no choice as I need to be able to use it for hours at a time. - Did I say how much I dislike Windows? It feels like one gigantic ad/data sucking platform. Like it’s not even trying to hide it anymore…

Would really like a 14 Pro. Unfortunately, that’s a no go. Now with the rumors of OLED in the refresh, hopes are all but dashed at this point.

Have you also tried the m1 pros?

 

[ghanwani]

I really HATE Windows, but have no choice as I need to be able to use it for hours at a time. - Did I say how much I dislike Windows? It feels like one gigantic ad/data sucking platform. Like it’s not even trying to hide it anymore…

I hate it as well and miss macOS but what to do when Apple doesn't care about their customers comfort. They talk big about being inclusive, but they have excluded me (and a whole bunch of others like me just because we are in a minority). If they wanted to be inclusive, they would offer EyeSafe options like most of the other vendors--you can find excellent displays from Dell, HP, and Lenovo.

 

[PwmMen]

For those who’ve used both: which one is better in terms of PWM/flicker and overall eye comfort?

I have no problems with the iPhone 17 Pro or the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Thanks to the PWM function, I can use all iPhone 17 devices without any issues.
The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max caused me significant problems, as I am also very sensitive to PWM.

 

[AshX]

Nightmare…so sorry to hear that.
If it’s any consolation, there was an active contributor on this thread a long while back who experienced the same physical trauma (seizure) using a new iPhone 15 PM while typing an email.
Clearly- for some people, Apple displays have become exceedingly toxic.
(and they didn’t used to be)

Thanks, it was a shock. I’ve used Apple devices and computers since the iPhone 3GS and never experienced anything like that. I had tested a 13” MacBook Air M4 and while that was really difficult to use, I was able to test it for a few days. I exchanged it for the 15” version thinking it was the panel and boom…

Interesting about the iPhone 15 PM. I first realized I had a problem with their screens when I tried upgrading from my iPhone 13 to the iPhone 15 Pro and couldn’t focus on the screen at all - it felt like trying to read something behind a waterfall. I had used the iPhone X, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 13 Pro prior to this with no issues. I learned about PWM and dithering after that.

I’ve been on my iPhone 13 on iOS 15 ever since with zero problems. My mom has an iPhone 13 she purchased at the same time from T-Mobile (fall 2022) and while iOS 18 isn’t as comfortable as iOS 15, I don’t have any severe symptoms using it. iOS 16 and 17 were bad on her phone, though.

What’s very curious to me is after returning the iPhone 15 Pro in May 2023, I went to several stores: the Apple Store, Best Buy, Verizon, and T-Mobile. I took my iPhone 13 manufactured in 2021 and held it side by side the iPhone 13’s Apple has starting selling as the “budget” model for the iPhone 15 cycle. All of the new ones were unusable side by side. So something changed on the hardware level after 2022, too, in addition to software. I used to be able to use my 12.9” iPad Pro M2 until I updated it to iPadOS 17.

My guess is that it’s a combination of really high modulation PWM with a low base frequency and dithering/FRC. I don’t have another explanation for what’s going on…those are the only things that changed. I can tolerate certain LED lighting, too, so long as it’s a low modulation and fairly high frequency. Apple is just using too much low frequency PWM and dithering and there doesn’t seem to be a way to mitigate it without using external displays or older devices on an older OS. I only care about professional work so I’d happily use anything if my software, Avid Pro Tools, would work.

 

[super chimp]

Can I ask has iOS 26 made people’s eye issue worse or no difference?

 

[MICHAELSD]

iPhone Air in hand, finally. As is too typical for me, this is my first time using the phone without having put it down since setup—while the apps download, I tend to visit MacRumors.

I do have to say that my experience testing the entire iPhone 17 lineup in an Apple Store was better than before. Maybe the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 even seemed to be slightly gentler on the eyes, but my instinct was to go for the Air so I stuck with that. From a purely display quality perspective, my initial assessment that this has one of the finest displays seen on an iPhone to date is correct. Slightly off-topic but the single speaker is really not a dealbreaker as it’s still superior to my iPhone SE, and quite clear and punchy.

Unfortunately I do think my expectation of the PWM toggle not doing enough to make a LCD-equivalent difference will come to fruition, but I also think I may last longer with this iPhone than I did with the past two generations of Pro iPhones. Part of me thought I wouldn’t be on here to report feedback so quickly. PWM switch toggled, interestingly not available in the setup Accessibility settings until the iPhone is activated.

 

[AshX]

iPhone Air in hand, finally. As is too typical for me, this is my first time using the phone without having put it down since setup—while the apps download, I tend to visit MacRumors.

I do have to say that my experience testing the entire iPhone 17 lineup in an Apple Store was better than before. Maybe the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 even seemed to be slightly gentler on the eyes, but my instinct was to go for the Air so I stuck with that. From a purely display quality perspective, my initial assessment that this has one of the finest displays seen on an iPhone to date is correct. Slightly off-topic but the single speaker is really not a dealbreaker as it’s still superior to my iPhone SE, and quite clear and punchy.

Unfortunately I do think my expectation of the PWM toggle not doing enough to make a LCD-equivalent difference will come to fruition, but I also think I may last longer with this iPhone than I did with the past two generations of Pro iPhones. Part of me thought I wouldn’t be on here to report feedback so quickly. PWM switch toggled, interestingly not available in the setup Accessibility settings until the iPhone is activated.

I checked the iPhone 17’s out on Best Buy where they were running iOS 26.1. I had seen them earlier at the Apple Store on iOS 26 and they were awful. I found them to be quite tolerable compared to the Macs or the iPhone 15 Pro they had on display. Very curious why this is.

 

[DJTaurus]

iPhone Air in hand, finally. As is too typical for me, this is my first time using the phone without having put it down since setup—while the apps download, I tend to visit MacRumors.

I do have to say that my experience testing the entire iPhone 17 lineup in an Apple Store was better than before. Maybe the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 even seemed to be slightly gentler on the eyes, but my instinct was to go for the Air so I stuck with that. From a purely display quality perspective, my initial assessment that this has one of the finest displays seen on an iPhone to date is correct. Slightly off-topic but the single speaker is really not a dealbreaker as it’s still superior to my iPhone SE, and quite clear and punchy.

Unfortunately I do think my expectation of the PWM toggle not doing enough to make a LCD-equivalent difference will come to fruition, but I also think I may last longer with this iPhone than I did with the past two generations of Pro iPhones. Part of me thought I wouldn’t be on here to report feedback so quickly. PWM switch toggled, interestingly not available in the setup Accessibility settings until the iPhone is activated.

Did you check your screen panel ?

 

[Maven1975]

Have you also tried the m1 pros?

I don’t recall anymore. I believe I have tried every variant. Are there reports of the M1 Pros not causing issues?

 

[dannyh5319]

I don’t recall anymore. I believe I have tried every variant. Are there reports of the M1 Pros not causing issues?

Supposedly those models don’t have pwm issues like other models. I recommend trying that one out.

 

[left shark fan]

Video on PWM. Good to see it mentioned in more videos!

 

[ghanwani]

Video on PWM. Good to see it mentioned in more videos!

Wish there were more people talking about all forms of dithering. That is as much of a problem as PWM for many.

 

[AshX]

Wish there were more people talking about all forms of dithering. That is as much of a problem as PWM for many.

I really hope Nick does a similar video for dithering and FRC. I can actually use some devices and LED lighting if they have low modulation PWM. But dithering? Absolutely brutal.

It makes sense though. Most of Apple’s devices were up until recently 60Hz refresh rate…and theoretically at 120Hz the frequency can get as low as 8Hz for temporal dithering, compares to 15Hz for the MBA and iPad Air. If 480Hz PWM is bad…no wonder 15Hz is seizure inducing for some of us.

The weird thing is, dithering is a much easier fix than PWM. Apple doesn’t have to re-design hardware, they just have to enable a toggle to disable both GPU dithering and TCON panel FRC. Stillcolor proved we can disable the GPU side, we just need a minor OS update with a firmware patch to enable user access to disable FRC, and probably an official system wide version of Stillcolor, that brings the output down to 8-bit and it’s solved. Easy.

 

[ghanwani]

The weird thing is, dithering is a much easier fix than PWM. Apple doesn’t have to re-design hardware, they just have to enable a toggle to disable both GPU dithering and TCON panel FRC. Stillcolor proved we can disable the GPU side, we just need a minor OS update with a firmware patch to enable user access to disable FRC, and probably an official system wide version of Stillcolor, that brings the output down to 8-bit and it’s solved. Easy.

They are probably worried they will get bad press of cheaping out on hardware.

 

[AshX]

They are probably worried they will get bad press of cheaping out on hardware.

I’m not so sure that’s it anymore after they implemented the PWM toggle. They could call it “low graphics mode” or something similar to what some smartphone brands have with “vivid color” modes and such that disable dithering when you switch to other modes. Or like other graphic cards just let you set the bit depth.

I’ve done a lot of research into Color Sync and Metal and I think this is a control thing. It cannot be understated just how involved Color Sync is with everything MacOS is doing relating to the display pipeline, including external displays. It’s why BetterDisplay is so useful.

Things like HDR and EDR are baked into MacOS and impossible to disable on every Mac since Ventura (Intel Macs used to have a toggle). So much of this is automated that to an extent I think disabling dithering is just the first step toward unpacking what the displays are doing.

I’m not affected by things like True Tone, night shift, and HDR on their OLED devices. But the LCD devices, probably given their hardware limitations and slow response times, implement these effects really poorly. It’s why all the iPhone 11 and SE users are completely screwed with newer versions of iOS: LCD iPhones and Macs cannot properly render the modern UI.

I’m going by experience here and drawing conclusions what I think is most likely given the hardware and software. I haven’t measured Subpixel response time so I can’t tell anyone for sure what’s happening. But I’ve observed enough of this weird pixel walking/flickering and pixel blurring behavior under microscope on Macs spanning that past 10 years that I think it’s fairly accurate.

There’s a strange hope OLED Macs will fix this. The problem is that OLED PCs really haven’t fixed this because of the awful PWM frequencies and modulations. And while the OLED iPhones and OLED iPads certainly do not have this crazy dithering that all the LCD Macs products do, once again, PWM makes them unsuitable for long use. I just have not seen enough advancement in OLED technology on the computing level that convinces me that 2026/2027 will solve any of these flicker techniques. So I do think we need accessibility toggles ASAP especially now that Windows 11 engineers have flat-out said that Windows 11 dithers no matter what unless you connect to a true 10-bit display.

 

[pwm away]

So roughly a week ago I decided to get myself the iPhone 17 Pro Max, from the Apple Store, with the return period post the new year.

I had previously tried the iPhone 17, but something didn't feel right, so I returned it.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max felt better. But something was not entirely right either. Difficult to say what. I used it for a while after setting it up. It was evening, so I had standard room lighting.
But, certainly, it felt better than previous models I had tried. The panel model was a G9P.

The next day I had a somewhat bad headache, one of the kind that can potentially develop into a migraine. I don't want to say that it was the phone, given the time of year, Christmas preparations, end of work, etc. It was a stressful time.
In any case, I decided to return it, and not give it much more of a try.
Also, and not that that was new to me when I bought it, I was feeling uncomfortable carrying around something worth ~USD 1,500, especially after having dropped my iPhone 16e a few times, and nicely damaged it.

So for now, I have the 16e (which I'll likely sell, rather than the cost of repairing all the damage). I also found a brand new iPhone SE (2022) at one of our mobile providers at ~USD 250, so I grabbed that as a nice backup.

Just a month ago, Honor started offering phones in my country, so I decided to get myself the Honor 400 Pro, which all around seems to be the one considered the one of the lowest modulations and best eye care features for an OLED. Let's see!

Side note: Came across this today: Honor Win and Win RT go official with 10,000mAh battery, active cooling fan. From the article:

... Full-HD+ resolution, HDR10+ support, and 5,920Hz high-frequency PWM dimming.

The Chinese manufacturers, especially Honor, seem to really be going for improving the effects for us. The Honor 400 Pro has 3,840Hz at low brightness, and DC like dimming above, with Radex measurements around 3% - 5% across the high to medium brightness spectrum. So I'm curious to see how it'll feel.
In any case, it feels like things are slowly improving (even with Apple's minimal effort). I'm tempted to give some Androids a try, at least until Apple embraces what Chinese manufacturers are embracing.
To some extent, I am feeling more annoyed about spending top $$$ just to be with Apple, when it's clear that their hardware is worse for our eye health, even if some of us are seeing fewer symptoms.

 

[AshX]

In any case, it feels like things are slowly improving (even with Apple's minimal effort). I'm tempted to give some Androids a try, at least until Apple embraces what Chinese manufacturers are embracing.
To some extent, I am feeling more annoyed about spending top $$$ just to be with Apple, when it's clear that their hardware is worse for our eye health, even if some of us are seeing fewer symptoms.

It really is like an abusive relationship. I think most of us would have jumped ship entirely if we didn’t have nearly 20 years worth of data and files (many of them professional, for me, at least) in the ecosystem - and if PCs and Windows weren’t going down a similar route.

I’m curious on the Mac side whether the rumored decoupling of the GPU might enable more options, assuming we can use external GPUs again.

 

[MICHAELSD]

Did you check your screen panel ?

I got the display panel I would have chosen if given the option, which is the LG GVC. I’ve found LG’s displays to be generally more natural-looking and easier on the eyes than Samsung’s, although I don’t have another display to reference. I do have to say that I did notice a difference between various iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro panels in the Apple Store, with the Pro not necessarily being better although there was variance between models.

As expected, iPhone Air still exhibits all of the negative effects of flickering OLED. Uncomfortable to stare at for more than short bursts, some degree of migraines/headaches after use although still gradually reduced generation-over-generation, and just not practical for me to be using daily.

I’m not disappointed since this is what I expected, and I’ve grown more accustomed to using an iPhone SE as my main device. Frankly the only way to provide feedback is to try it, so I will send feedback to Apple along the lines of either eliminating flicker altogether or creating an Accessibility setting that’s ultra-low-modulation with the goal of measuring no-risk on a flicker meter equivalent to any LCD iPhone.

I would designate the flicker as getting 10% better every generation, so maybe iPhone 20 will be usable? There are brands releasing smartphones with OLED “flicker-free certified” rates of 5,000Hz+. As long as these panels continue getting better in regards to eye health and flicker, and brands like Apple are encouraged to become an industry leader, the situation will continue to improve. Unfortunately, iPhone 17 is not the generation with a solution for the most sensitive users.

 

[DJTaurus]

I got the display panel I would have chosen if given the option, which is the LG GVC. I’ve found LG’s displays to be generally more natural-looking and easier on the eyes than Samsung’s, although I don’t have another display to reference. I do have to say that I did notice a difference between various iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro panels in the Apple Store, with the Pro not necessarily being better although there was variance between models.

As expected, iPhone Air still exhibits all of the negative effects of flickering OLED. Uncomfortable to stare at for more than short bursts, some degree of migraines/headaches after use although still gradually reduced generation-over-generation, and just not practical for me to be using daily.

I’m not disappointed since this is what I expected, and I’ve grown more accustomed to using an iPhone SE as my main device. Frankly the only way to provide feedback is to try it, so I will send feedback to Apple along the lines of either eliminating flicker altogether or creating an Accessibility setting that’s ultra-low-modulation with the goal of measuring no-risk on a flicker meter equivalent to any LCD iPhone.

I would designate the flicker as getting 10% better every generation, so maybe iPhone 20 will be usable? There are brands releasing smartphones with OLED “flicker-free certified” rates of 5,000Hz+. As long as these panels continue getting better in regards to eye health and flicker, and brands like Apple are encouraged to become an industry leader, the situation will continue to improve. Unfortunately, iPhone 17 is not the generation with a solution for the most sensitive users.

Yeap I couldn’t tolerate the LG AIR too and sold it back then.

 

[dannyh5319]

Yeap I couldn’t tolerate the LG AIR too and sold it back then.

Still using the air DJ?

 

[DJTaurus]

Still using the air DJ?

yeap. waiting my leather case to be delivered...... G9Q samsung panel FTW!

Shoutout to an "indie manufacturer"

 

[dimitricook]

yeap. waiting my leather case to be delivered...... G9Q samsung panel FTW!

Shoutout to an "indie manufacturer"

So good you can tolerate the air now.
I am testing an Air with an LG display but can't really get used to it, seems to give me the symptoms like all other phones even with your advised settings.

What was the big difference when you go an Samsung panel, was the brightness less harsh or something you noticed?

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Has anyone else updated to iOS 26.2? I updated my iPhone Air and this might be anecdotal but it feels like my eyes start burning much faster than before.

26.1 was completely unusable for me. I find 26.2 with the PWM toggle off and the screen dim, to be mostly usable.

 

[MICHAELSD]

Yeap I couldn’t tolerate the LG AIR too and sold it back then.

It definitely still causes the typical symptoms. There’s really been no step change in the flicker amelioration for me personally. Newer generations do cause less persistent headaches than iPhone X, but they’re still far off of the comfortability of an iPhone XR, iPhone 11, or iPhone SE.