If they INSIST that it MUST be 60 Hz, I'd accept the consolation/compromise of 60 Hz but 0ms-ish latency. (Maybe they already do it that way.)
As in waiiiiit until the 16.67ms between frames is almost up while sampling inputs, then bam!, render quicky, bam!, transfer it over a link that could carry more than 60 frames per second, bam!, fast OLED display. Each frame fresh and close to input.
To the why?-sayers: Because the difference is noticeable. We can get all philosophical and discuss whether it's a competitive advantage for someone to not notice the difference, or vice versa. Why the why?, why not just… take us difference-noticers on our word? Like… we're not taking your 60Hz 16.67ms crunchiness away from you?
Imagine if someone said "this food won't really taste better to you when you first eat it, but after 6 months you'll find other food tastes worse". To me, this would not be a selling point.
And I would disagree that only the story matters. If that were the case, people wouldn't go to the theater (a trend that has started happening in the last 15 years as people have been able to rig their living rooms to give an experience that is nearly theater quality, especially when considering cost and convenience. When we had 20" TVs, they were no substitute for going to the movies.
Either way, a larger screen is not the same improvement as higher resolution. And more importantly, the reason people may not go to the movies when they have a home theater system is partly due to justifying the cost of the theater system.
With food also you could be incrementally getting better and better food and when you then try v1 it would taste bad.
It seems that we might also be noticing slight degradation more than slight improvement in general? No idea if that's true.
I've often had new phones that are 'faster' but I barely notice the fastness until I go back to my old phone and realise that my finger-memory needs adapting because things take just a bit longer to load.
I'd assume it's similar for screen refresh rates.
When I got the phones, I did not notice any benefit related to screen refresh. I also did not notice any detriment when I went back to my 13 mini after two weeks on a 120 Hz screen.
But if it was as GP said, and it's only something you notice when you go back to a "lesser" screen, then that would not be a selling point in my book.
Not a blind test, but the smoothness when tracking a moving object is very obvious
But maybe it's because I'm 40+ with relatively bad eye vision and 20 years earlier I'd be noticing the difference much more.. But I'd say going from 1080p to 4k was a lot more obvious than that...
60fps is basically fine as long as you are unaware that it can be any better, but once you find out you are forever spoiled by the knowledge.
I know there's a sizable contingent of people who just think a bigger number is better, but realistically this is a device for passively consuming text and video content that is typically around 30 fps anyway. Why waste the battery power on faster refresh?
Does the page look and feel glued to your finger as you scroll?
Yes, for me issues with apps have mainly been in poorly optimized code causing lag, slow loading and the like. The 60hz/120hz thing has never really been a practical issue.
I'm sure a lot of people now would feel odd if you gave them a 60Hz phone after high refresh has become so common, even if they don't pay conscious attention to that kind of stuff
"I don't have an issue with it, so most people also don't have an issue with it"
False Consensus Effect (or false consensus fallacy):
It happens when someone overestimates how much other people agree with them, assuming that their own personal beliefs, values, or experiences are the default for everyone else.
It's a very small minority who cares.
Cite your sources, please or you're just echoing "trust me, bro".
Without this, it'd be very hard for an average user to "feel" a performance difference between an A18 Pro in the Neo and say as far as the M5 Max in a MacBook Pro unless they had a "special" use case which really needed the extra CPU/GPU cores.
Of course, they can't stay forever on that. E.g. with the iPhone 17 they finally flipped the non-Pro over. Probably because it was starting to make the iPhone seem sluggish/stuttery compared to other phones more than it was making the iPhone 18 seem fast. Tablets have never seemed to be as fierce a market in terms of your average Joe comparing them, but I'd expect the same switch to being a liability instead of a tool will happen there as well (if they aren't already late to the game).
Whether the hardware can keep up with Liquid Glass and push 120 frames a second is a different story, of course.
If only "pro consumers" noticed or cared... well, those "pro consumers" are the ones who think it looks like shit and would rather have a TV without it.
Actually surprised to learn Apple did the OLED swap and didn't use the opportunity to bump it up at least to 90 hz like the OLED Steam Deck.
It will be buttery smooth between the chops.
Outdated comparison now that Liquid Glass is lagging my phone.
20 years ago I was gaming at 30fps and called it smooth. Now 120Hz feels like bare minimum.
It's probably not actually as hard to go back as we think it is, but holding on to stuff is in our genes.
My personal experience is that I do notice the difference - for like a minute - and then I adjust and never care anymore.
I don't know how "mobile" gamers are using iPads (or tablets), but considering the size of the market, I doubt it's particularly niche.
Look at Apple’s own smartphone lineup. The Pro models with 120Hz screens get better battery life than the low end iPhone models.
You could make up for the difference in battery life with an almost undetectable amount of extra battery capacity from both a cost and size standpoint.
Do you think they couldn't add a refresh rate control to the device if you wanted to have lower battery? They already have variable refresh rate implemented, a much harder problem.
I remember the age of when Intel used to lock down hardware multipliers for overclocking behind the K versions, and GPUs did too. This is a well known practice, and Apple is not above it.
I get horribly motion sick playing some games like Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime, or the original DOOM. I run my phone at 120Hz and like it. For games, cranking up the FoV tends to help, also disabling effects like viewbobbing, blur, shaking, etc.
I understand this is not fun to experiment with, though. Once I'm motion sick, I tend to be the entire day, only sleeping fixes it, so I'm not usually excited to keep trying to tweak the thing that makes me sick. I tend to dive into settings before playing any game now. I hate when it auto starts the game to appear cinematic.
The iPhone sells way more units than the iPad, so it makes sense that it's not a feature for the iPad mini yet.
I bought the new 8 inch Alexa tablet the other day, and the price was decent but it's a piece of shit. I only wanted it for putting on a video in bed while I fall asleep but it can't even do that because when you drop the brightness to minimum, the display randomly turns off (not actually locking the screen, it's still running the app and active, you can touch stuff you can't see, but the pixels are turned off)
That's...horrifying.
Have you tried closing your eyes?
- Apple introduces OLED and talks about deep blacks and 1200 bits
- Why do they think people care about the above and not 120hz as well?
To the average consumer, neither matters much. True. But the above did not make much sense to me.
120hz at 5k requires Thunderbolt 5 (ie better graphics card, more info down the pipeline.
Which is why most of the PC world is on cheap 4k monitors still.
Most 5K monitors on the PC side are not going to be driven over Thunderbolt, but rather DisplayPort or HDMI.
And the most popular resolution on PC is not 4k, but rather 1080p and 1440p.
To the average consumer, obsessing over scroll feeling not completely perfect is a distraction from watching the next Avengers movie, if not downright neurotic behavior.
To a prosumer, the value may be obvious but the price may not be worth it. Which can lead to a distaste for the company, for not being a more accommodating company.
To a professional, if you need it, you need it, and you begrudgingly pay for it. Because you need it.
I don’t even know what my phone screen has. Wasn’t why I bought the pro at the time. Wanted the additional ram. So I wouldn’t feel as pressed to upgrade now. (Prosumer, aka neurotic.)
I could not care less about any refresh rate over 30.
You can care about it, but that just means it sounds like a differentiator to me, not something everyone should pay for just because you care about it.
You will have to somehow prove it if you would say that the panel and driver chip are all already ready to do 100+ hz for free by default, and are actually artificially limited, and that that artificial limitation doesn't come with some other advantage like battery life (allowing a smaller battery or less cost in some other way).
I can spot a 60Hz display from jiggling the mouse pointer for a second.
I’ve also done side-by-side comparisons of full screen scrolling on 60Hz and 120Hz screens for less technical people who could barely perceive a difference when I was pointing it out, but it took some time to get them to see it.
MKBHD (YouTube tech video and reviewer) talks about this a lot: It’s highly valuable to people like you and me who are attuned to the performance of our devices, but most people don’t notice. Or care!
I would appreciate high Hz displays everywhere, but I admit that Apple has probably made the right consumer choice tradeoff to compromise on refresh rate for these lower end devices where minimum cost and maximum battery life are the two most important features for those who buy them.
So if you’re actively moving between a high-refresh-rate device (like a lot of people here with their 144hz monitors) and then one with a lower refresh rate, you’re probably more sensitive (and potentially annoyed) by the discrepancy.
Viewing distance plays a factor too. I realized 4k tvs are useless to me because I can't perceive 1080p pixels unless I'm comparison shopping in a TV show room from 2 feet away (probably why they don't let you experience appropriate TV viewing distances in these spaces in the first place).