It is considered an inferior solution for display dimming and many external monitor companies offer flicker free as a major feature.
Not wrong.
I know in my case, low frequency PWM causes problems for me. Those half-wave rectified LED Christmas bulbs are painful. Yet, I'll see people walk up, look at the flickering displays, and buy them anyways. It boggles my mind.
And early PWM on displays were awful. 60-120Hz. So I understand where the reputation comes from, since I had to buy flicker free in that era.
If it doesn't affect you enough to notice, good. But the theory is that it is still causing fatigue to your eyes.
Pick what works for you personally and move on, laptop rankings are marketing.
For others who want to read more, there are a variety of websites that cover this.
Ironically from your own links:
As laid out in both studies by Retro-PC-Mania and Dial GambH linked above, PWM LED frequencies of 3000Hz or above would eliminate chances of users having issues, as no evidence has been found of effects on humans at these frequencies.
And here we're discussing 130,000Hz frequencies.
I've been able to catch flicker in the 1000-2000Hz range with my aquarium (fast moving air bubbles help raise the Flicker Fusion Threshold). But Apple is using a frequency nearly two orders of magnitude over what the studies found. In general, I do think we need more research to replicate results, but so far I'm not buying that 100kHz+ is a major eye strain/fatigue risk. Logically, it isn't that different from suggesting that it's possible that drinking
less (but not zero) wine will get you
more drunk, everything else being equal.
For all we know he just has difficulty adjusting to the larger screen and that is making him ill. His old laptop used PWM too by the way.
This.
There's so many ways we can create eye strain day to day with lighting, that anecdotes aren't terribly helpful without details. Brightness, how much of our field of view is filled with the display, improper environment lighting, and low PWM frequencies all contribute in different ways to strain. It doesn't help that LED not only brought us PWM backlighting, but also the ability to build big PC monitors with eye-searing brightness.
I tend to keep my displays at 100-120 nits, and I can't imagine trying to use them at over 160-200 nits day to day, it'd just be too painful. And yet they keep coming out of the box at ~300 nits by default. Yeesh.
I suffer from pwm I gave back my iphone 11 pro, apple watch 4, they had oled and PWM
I cannot see PWM flicker on the MacBook and eyes feel fine
Huh, I had to look it up, but they do use PWM to control the pixel brightness. And the frequency is too low, IMO. For me, 480Hz is about minimum for TV/Movies before things are "okay".
