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Late 2019 MBP 16” - PWM?

powerslave12r said:
I'm with you, that theoretically, such high frequencies should make this a non-issue, but yet, we have people who report problems. It seems like a hard problem to test and generalize the effects of various PWM frequencies on a large number of people.
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We have people reporting problems, not reporting evidence that PWM is the cause, which they would have no way to know, and we have strong reason to suspect isn't the case. 130K Hz is orders of magnitude faster than what the eye can register.

That said, those who don't want any PWM at any frequency for whatever reason, good or bad, now know that it's present and can decide accordingly.
 
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matram said:
Assuming I have not misunderstood how this work.

Varying the DC voltage, would require a resistor in series with the LED to get a varying current, and although this may work for a small device like a watch. I doubt that it will be an effective approach for a 500 nits LED backlight.

Are there any Apple competitors that do this for similar type products?
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All of my desktop monitors use DC backlighting. PG279Q from Asus at 450 Nits peak brightness and two Dells one 1440p and one 4K also at 450 Nits peak brightness. All are large 27" panels.

The point though is PWM gets a bad rap mostly due to poor implementations. But Apples implementation on their notebooks is not poor, the frequency of the pulses they use is so high it wont induce eyestrain. If you point a high speed camera at these displays you won't even see the flickering on that until you get to a very high frame rate (like 1000 FPS) which is why you don't see them flicker even in youtube videos unlike old CRT panels or some very cheap LCD panels.

Another example of poor PWM implementations would be LED flickering on backlit keyboards, if you look at reviews for those on YouTube you may see them flickering and the reviewer will say it only flickers on camera, this is due to the PWM pulses being at a low frequency such as below 200 Hz.
 
Sanpete said:
As explained above, the 16" has PWM at 130KHz, orders of magnitude faster than what the eye can register, virtually impossible to cause any trouble. The touch bar flickers at 240Hz, and probably has since 2016.
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You can just put any tape over the touch bar.
 
Maven1975 said:
I have been boxed out of Apples most recent laptops over the last 24 months due to the PWM implementation.

Has anyone checked to see if PWM is present on the 16”?

Thanks in advance!
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I registered just to say I have the exact same issue. I have very sensitive eyes, so I usually select monitors with 0 PWM. I got Macbook Pro 16 at work and immediately felt something wrong, even though before that I've tried old Macbook 12 and it was fine. I also use iPhone 7 and it's a comfortable device for reading books for me. Seems that Macbooks Pro 16 high-frequency flickering still affects sensitive eyes. In my case, my company can't return it, so I'm not sure what to do, but working on it is very tiring for my eyes.
 
Sanpete said:
As explained above, the 16" has PWM at 130KHz, orders of magnitude faster than what the eye can register, virtually impossible to cause any trouble. The touch bar flickers at 240Hz, and probably has since 2016.
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Yet here we are, having eye irritation. Old iPhones have no flicker at all and I can read books on them (7, SE) for hours without any discomfort.
 
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