It’s not a problem so to speak. It’s a cheap way to control screen brightness. There is a way to make oled screens that don’t use pwm, but it costs more so Samsung and others done utilize it.
I suffer from pwm myself, and I’m not holding my breath that this will ever be fixed until we move on to new tech. I’m hoping micro led won’t use pwm, but I haven’t looked into it. For now, the issue only concerns such a small amount of users that it won’t be addressed. These companies aren’t losing money, therefore they have no incentive to “fix” the issue. I personally have completely moved on from the hobby of buying phones every year. I can’t use the new ones, so it sucks the enjoyment out of it.
Even removing my interest in phones from the equation, as a parent whose children are now being educated exclusively via Zoom on iPads, I am concerned that they are all battling eye fatigue and frequent headaches.
If tech doesn’t have to hurt like this, and it’s all due to penny pinching, all of us relying on these displays for our education and livelihoods need to sort this out with Apple and other companies. I also need to sort this out with the school administration but that’s another uphill battle.
The first step is trying to get this issue recognized by experts. My ophthalmologist seems completely unaware. He didn’t seem to care when I brought the subject up. He seemed to think it is something for a neurologist to be concerned with. The problem is, I see my ophthalmologist annually, but I have seen a neurologist only a handful of times in my life, and it was pretty damned hard to get a referral on one kind of insurance I used to have. Most people never see one.
For awareness to happen and for the necessary evidence to be collected and studied, we need to reach a certain critical mass of people reporting to their doctors, so that the medical profession starts caring, then legislators, employers, schools and so forth.
Apple won’t really know what direction to go, themselves. They don’t have any data to consult. Most of what we seem to know seems to be coming from these grassroots discussions. And we see how well that’s going over with people not experiencing this for themselves.
FWIW, I think Apple have tried to address the problem. I can use the 11 Pro and 12. I couldn’t look at their older OLED displays at all. They do change the “formula” from year to year trying to get better aesthetic results and fight burn-in. I think it is hard for them to chase those goals without throwing us pwm sensitive customers off balance. I have had watering stinging eyes on my 12 Pro and 12, coming from the 11 Pro. I’m adjusting. But I discovered a new wrinkle with the new displays is that I get sort of a pressure headache wearing my glasses while watching videos on my 12. It may be due to my lenses being polarized. I never noticed that problem on my 11 Pro display. So while the displays are as gorgeous as ever, maybe more so, they’re different from last year’s in some way.