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I know Apple wants to differentiate ProMotion as a Pro feature, but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Stuf

I know Apple wants to differentiate ProMotion as a Pro feature, but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Stuff that would be completely unheard of purely because of how noticeable 60hz vs 120hz is. Actual reputational damage is going on because of these poor decisions, I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share. They just look like old and slow phones to most normal people now, “look how nice and smooth it looks” is such an easy selling point compared to trying to pretend people care about whatever Apple Intelligence is.

crazygringo 2y ago
> but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Stuff that would be completely unheard of purely because of how noticeable 60hz vs 120hz is. Are they? I'm a tech person and I can barely notice it at all. And I don't think I have a single non-tech friend who is even aware of the concept of video refresh rate. Whenever there's something that doesn't feel smooth about an interface, it's because the app/CPU isn't keeping up. I've honestly never understood why anyone cares about more than 60hZ for screens, for general interfaces/scrolling. (Unless it's about video game response time, but that's not about "running smoother".)
- Jcampuzano2 2y ago
  Yeah I think when they say non-tech people they mean a subset of people who know a bit about refresh rates (example being avid PC gamers for instance), but I'd still say the vast majority of people cannot tell 60 to 120. That or its not something they think about. Certainly if they had both side by side they may be able to notice a difference, but in everyday use it makes no real difference to the vast majority of people. Anecdotally even though I do use Android myself, everyone around me still think iPhones look the smoothest (albeit most of them have never even touched a quality phone running android)
  - Ataraxic 2y ago
    It's one of those things where once you have used it, you will notice it. Given most iOS users aren't swapping between pro and non pro models, it's not something you think about.
    - deleted 2y ago
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  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    They don't know the words but they definitely notice it. "Why is it so smooth/rough?"
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    >Yeah I think when they say non-tech people they mean a subset of people who know a bit about refresh rates (example being avid PC gamers for instance) no, he didn't say that. he said they comment on the difference between apple and android (their perception). you have to take that as a given. that "it's because refresh rate" is his hypothesis, so yes argue that, but not by changing his evidence.
  - pishpash 2y ago
    Just tried ProMotion vs. 60Hz on MBP, no/very little difference I can see. Sure it's just me but for me all the claims here are way exaggerated/psychological, almost like audiophiles being able to "hear" stuff that doesn't exist in a blind test.
    - klausa 2y ago
      As one of the upthread comments mentioned, this is something that probably varies with sensitivity between people. But I am quite confident I'd be able to tell 60/120hz with a 100% accuracy within 5s of being able to interact with the device. Probably under a second on an iPhone, ~2s on a Mac with a built-in display and slightly longer on iPads and bigger displays. Add ~2 extra second if I'm using a mouse instead of a trackpad. It is _that_ noticeable to me.
    - 2y ago
- declan_roberts 2y ago
  They definitely are not. Not even most tech power users understand refresh rates let alone can easily spot the difference. Still a nice to have, which Apple recognizes.
- klausa 2y ago
  I actually call BS on the "not-being-able-to-tell". I will give you that most people outside of this websites audience will not be able to _tell_ it's because of the refresh rate. But I am quite confident if you take most of 120hz iPhone users phones out of their hand, turn on low battery mode, most will be immediately able to tell that something _feels_ off.
  - stringsandchars 2y ago
    > I actually call BS on the "not-being-able-to-tell". I actually call BS on your BS. I don't believe that people are standing with two phones in their hand - an Android and an iPhone - and comparing them the way that people here are suggesting. I don't think I have ever seen anyone do that IRL, and I don't believe anyone actually does it. People go to the Apple Store to get their iPhone or to some other store to get their Android phone, because they are interested in either platform, and absolutely not thinking about hopping from one to the other based on some imperceptible screen-refresh 'smoothness'.
    - klausa 2y ago
      That's... not what I said at all? The only claim I made is that if you toggle between 60/120hz on people's devices, they will be able to tell the difference.
    - jjcob 2y ago
      i used an android phone for a year with a 90 fps display. When I switched back to an iphone, it felt slow to me. i couldn't tell what the problem was, the brand new phone just felt sluggish. a year later when using my partners iphone pro, i realised that the sluggishness must be because of the refresh rate. i think once you get used to 90 or 120 fps, then 60fps will just feel choppy. no need to compare them side by side.
- meindnoch 2y ago
  If you try using a 60hz screen after a 120hz one, it will feel very sluggish and choppy. As long as you don't get used to 120hz, you'll be fine with 60hz.
  - brk 2y ago
    I've never really felt this way, and have used all kinds of screens of various resolutions, sizes, technologies, etc. For 99% of the typical use cases (chats, email, doom scrolling, etc.) there just is not a big enough perceptible difference for most buyers. Screen refresh rate arguments are starting to have hints of audiophile discussions.
    - hnuser123456 2y ago
      I flatly will not buy any monitor, laptop, phone, tablet, or TV with a refresh rate below 120hz. I had 120hz 1080p over DVI-dual link in 2010. I can accept graphically demanding games going down to ~50 fps, but for UI interactivity and navigation, I'll take 120hz+ only.
      - mvanbaak 2y ago
        And there you are, watching a movie on that 120p+ tv. You do k ow the movie is only 24p right?
        hnuser123456 2y ago
        I also (hopefully) don't have to interact with any UI while the movie is playing, but if I did, I'd want that UI running at 120hz. Maybe TV streamers will start advertising 120hz output soon. Maybe I should just replace my streamer with a spare PC that can output 120.
        volemo 2y ago
        > Maybe TV streamers will start advertising 120hz output soon. 120 Hz won’t make a difference on a TV box, imo, as abysmal state of their UI is far greater of a problem. High refresh rate is nothing when a transition takes seconds and when scroll is jittery even by 60 Hz standards. :(
- deleted 2y ago
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- electrograv 2y ago
  Yes, human visual perception exists along a spectrum of temporal, spatial, and chromatic resolution that varies from person to person — I’ve even met some people who can’t perceive the difference between 30hz and 120hz, while to me and most people I know, the difference between 60hz and 120hz is enormous. So you could make the same argument against high DPI displays, superior peak screen brightness, enormously better contrast ratio, color gamut, etc. Also speaker quality, keyboard quality, trackpad quality, etc. Where does this argument end? Do you propose we regress to 60hz 1080p displays with brightness, contrast, and viewing angles that are abysmal by modern standards? Or is the claim that the MacBook Air’s current screen is the perfect “sweet spot” beyond which >99% of people can’t tell the difference? I think the market data alone disproves this pretty conclusively. Clearly a significant enough percentage of the population cares enough about image quality to vote with their wallets so much so that enormous hardware industries continue to invest billions towards make any incremental progress in advancing the technology here. To be fair, I think there’s strong data to support that modern “retina”-grade DPI is good enough for >99% of people. And you can argue that XDR/HDR is not applicable/useful for coding or other tasks outside of photo/video viewing/editing (though for the latter it is enormously noticeable and not even remotely approaching human visual limits yet). But there’s plenty of people who find refresh rate differences extremely noticeable (usually up to at least 120hz), and I think almost anyone can easily notice moderate differences in contrast ratio and max brightness in a brightly lit room.
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  - VincentEvans 2y ago
    Lol, reminds me of audiophile discussions when most people listen to youtube streaming a recompressed version of an mp3 someone uploaded.
    - toxik 2y ago
      It’s not imagined though, I use my partner’s phone sometimes and every time I used it I thought it was broken because the UI jitter was so jarring at 60Hz. Actually I’m still not convinced her phone isn’t broken. Also her flashlight resets to the lowest brightness EVERY time it’s cycled.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  It just feels more "fluid" and real, and then you get used to it and 60Hz feels jittery. I have an iPad pro, and its honestly made me consider going with an iPhone Pro (I still have just the non-pro model), although not quite yet. However, I notice a huge difference between scrolling on my phone and scrolling on my ipad. Its the same thing about retina vs. the previous resolutions we had put up with. Yes, you don't need them for text, but once you get used to it for text you don't want to go back.
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  - pitkali 2y ago
    For me, the crisp text was the reason retina became a must.
- alpaca128 2y ago
  On smartphones you interact with the UI in a more direct way, which probably makes the input latency even more obvious. For me 120Hz is noticeable immediately when scrolling, though I also don’t find it important enough to warrant a higher price aside from gaming. What I find more important is a high pixel density, though on phones that’s less of an issue as with PC screens - I have yet to find one comparable to the ones in current iMacs.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  I switch between refresh rates ranging from 60hz and 240hz every day and while I certainly notice the difference, unless I’m running games I adjust and forget about it in seconds. While VRR 120hz+ on all Apple device screens would be nice it’s not exactly a dealbreaker… it’s not like rendering my IDE with 2x+ extra frames changes much of anything.
- jofzar 2y ago
  In seriously surprised you can't tell, it feels significantly smoother for me to see a high refresh rate display. 60hz just looks sluggish/slow and wrong to me now. I had a side by side of the same monitor (was at a lan) and was watching my friend play and couldn't understand why his game looked so laggy untill I realise he had high refresh rate off. Turned on 144hz and it was so much better
  - aardvark179 2y ago
    That may have very little to do with refresh rate itself, and far more to do with the image processing and latency introduced by the monitor in different video modes.
- minton 2y ago
  I run Windows daily at work on a 60Hz display. I recently got my son a gaming PC complete with a 144Hz monitor. I was genuinely confused why Windows itself “felt” so much better. Just dragging windows around seemed like magic. It’s not that the UI is lagging on my machine, it’s more the smoothness of things when they move around. It makes everything seem faster, despite us timing various things and finding no actual performance differences.
petesergeant 2y ago
> I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share. They just look like old and slow phones to most normal people now Literally the only people I know with non-iPhones are: * People who can't afford one * People who want a folding screen * People who are conceptually anti-Apple Apple have over 50% market share in the US, talking about "struggling to obtain new market share" seems bizarre.
- jghn 2y ago
  * People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets
  - nordsieck 2y ago
    > People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets It's my impression that Apple really tried to service this market - that last model was probably the iPhone 13 mini. I assume that there just isn't enough demand for smaller phones to justify the effort to develop them. I was honestly hoping that we'd get a small phone as the iPhone SE 4. But it seems like that's not to be. At least, if the 16e is the closest we'll get to an SE in the near term.
    - momoschili 2y ago
      yup, I bought a 13 mini and was happy that Apple was one of the companies that supported this form factor. That being said, the 13 mini sales numbers speak for themselves and I understand why this kind of phone isn't released every year. I'm holding out that Apple recognizes that most of the users of the 13 mini aren't serial upgraders and will continue refreshing the segment every 5 years or so
      - jghn 2y ago
        Yeah I'm holding out that they've decided to just refresh the small form factor on a slower cadence. I also have a 13 mini, we'll see how long I can hold out.
      - 2y ago
turtlesdown11 2y ago
>I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share Apple has >80% of the total operating profit in the smartphone market. The new entry level phone went up in price $200. Why do you think they do/should care about market share?
- overstay8930 2y ago
  Their stock price is currently suffering because of how poorly iPhones are doing in places with real competition (i.e. China), the iPhone 16 when put side by side with Chinese phones just makes the iPhone look like a cheap knock-off. Even 90hz would fix most of these problems (and the panel is more than capable of it). They're fixing it on the iPhone 17 because of the above reasons, but it shows how badly their market research teams are doing that they even remotely thought it was acceptable on the 15, let alone the 16.
  - turtlesdown11 2y ago
    > poorly iPhones are doing in places with real competition (i.e. China) ah yes, a country famous for capitalist competition
wlesieutre 2y ago
Rumored to change next year https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-17-just-tipped-for-this-long-overdue-pro-upgrade https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-17-just-tipp... Would be nice if the laptops followed suit
whynotminot 2y ago
Have never heard anyone in my life that isn’t an engineer comment on Pro Motion. Not even in an accidental sort of “hmmm why does my phone just feel faster” kind of way. This is a feature that really only matters to the Hacker News crowd, and Apple is very aware of that. They invest their BOM into things the majority of people care about. And they do have the Pro Motion screens for the few that do. Even I — an engineer - regularly move between my Pro Motion enabled iPhone and my regular 60Hz iPad and while I notice it a little, I really just don’t see why this is the one hill people choose to die on.
- electrograv 2y ago
  You have to understand that your own perceptual experience is not identical to that of all other humans. Without recognizing that, we will inevitably end up talking past each other endlessly and writing each other off as { hallucinating, lying, exaggerating, etc } for one of us claiming to perceive something important that the other does not. It would be no different than arguing about whether we need all three primary colors (red, green, blue) with someone who is colorblind (and unaware of this). Or like arguing whether speakers benefit from being able to reproduce a certain frequency, with someone who is partially or fully deaf at that frequency. And I truly mean no disrespect to anyone with different perception abilities in these or any other domains. Recognizing that large differences exist here is essential to make sense of the reality - that something that seems completely unimportant or barely noticeable to you, could actually be a hugely obvious and important difference to many others (whether it’s a certain screen refresh rate, the presence of a primary color you cannot perceive but others can, an audio frequency you cannot hear but others can, or otherwise).
  - whynotminot 2y ago
    This is why I led with this part, unrelated to my own perception: > Have never heard anyone in my life that isn’t an engineer comment on Pro Motion. Not even in an accidental sort of “hmmm why does my phone just feel faster” kind of way. I would also argue the crowd that insists everyone needs Pro Motion is doing exactly what you accuse me of -- assuming their needs and perception must also be everyone else's. When clearly the market has said otherwise, given Apple's success for many, many years with 60Hz screens.
0x457 2y ago
120Hz on Android IMO is: try once, say "damn that's smooth" and then disable to save battery life. I only ever used Pixels as android phones, so my experience is limited to that.
- rizzaxc 2y ago
  genuine question; why would you do that lol? phones easily get full day battery nowadays, and flagships get 2 day battery if your usage is anything but insane
  - 0x457 2y ago
    The only way any phone gets more than 1 day of battery is when you don't use it. In which case, why you care that if it's 120 or 60hz. I'm back to iPhone now tho, so I get a full-day-ish with pro-motion under a normal usage.
- Tarball10 2y ago
  120Hz on Snapdragon/Mediatek Android phones works great with little impact to battery life. Pixels are hobbled by the poor power efficiency of their Tensor chips.
wordofx 2y ago
> but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Things that never happened. Lot of reasons to dislike. iPhone but this story isn’t true in the least.
presentation 2y ago
I don’t think I have a non technical friend who is ever comparing Android phones and iPhones, let alone noticing screen differences

crazygringo 2y ago

> but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Stuff that would be completely unheard of purely because of how noticeable 60hz vs 120hz is. Are they? I'm a tech person and I can barely notice it at all. And I don't think I have a single non-tech friend who is even aware of the concept of video refresh rate. Whenever there's something that doesn't feel smooth about an interface, it's because the app/CPU isn't keeping up. I've honestly never understood why anyone cares about more than 60hZ for screens, for general interfaces/scrolling. (Unless it's about video game response time, but that's not about "running smoother".)

Jcampuzano2 2y ago
Yeah I think when they say non-tech people they mean a subset of people who know a bit about refresh rates (example being avid PC gamers for instance), but I'd still say the vast majority of people cannot tell 60 to 120. That or its not something they think about. Certainly if they had both side by side they may be able to notice a difference, but in everyday use it makes no real difference to the vast majority of people. Anecdotally even though I do use Android myself, everyone around me still think iPhones look the smoothest (albeit most of them have never even touched a quality phone running android)
- Ataraxic 2y ago
  It's one of those things where once you have used it, you will notice it. Given most iOS users aren't swapping between pro and non pro models, it's not something you think about.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  They don't know the words but they definitely notice it. "Why is it so smooth/rough?"
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >Yeah I think when they say non-tech people they mean a subset of people who know a bit about refresh rates (example being avid PC gamers for instance) no, he didn't say that. he said they comment on the difference between apple and android (their perception). you have to take that as a given. that "it's because refresh rate" is his hypothesis, so yes argue that, but not by changing his evidence.
- pishpash 2y ago
  Just tried ProMotion vs. 60Hz on MBP, no/very little difference I can see. Sure it's just me but for me all the claims here are way exaggerated/psychological, almost like audiophiles being able to "hear" stuff that doesn't exist in a blind test.
  - klausa 2y ago
    As one of the upthread comments mentioned, this is something that probably varies with sensitivity between people. But I am quite confident I'd be able to tell 60/120hz with a 100% accuracy within 5s of being able to interact with the device. Probably under a second on an iPhone, ~2s on a Mac with a built-in display and slightly longer on iPads and bigger displays. Add ~2 extra second if I'm using a mouse instead of a trackpad. It is _that_ noticeable to me.
  - 2y ago
declan_roberts 2y ago
They definitely are not. Not even most tech power users understand refresh rates let alone can easily spot the difference. Still a nice to have, which Apple recognizes.
klausa 2y ago
I actually call BS on the "not-being-able-to-tell". I will give you that most people outside of this websites audience will not be able to _tell_ it's because of the refresh rate. But I am quite confident if you take most of 120hz iPhone users phones out of their hand, turn on low battery mode, most will be immediately able to tell that something _feels_ off.
- stringsandchars 2y ago
  > I actually call BS on the "not-being-able-to-tell". I actually call BS on your BS. I don't believe that people are standing with two phones in their hand - an Android and an iPhone - and comparing them the way that people here are suggesting. I don't think I have ever seen anyone do that IRL, and I don't believe anyone actually does it. People go to the Apple Store to get their iPhone or to some other store to get their Android phone, because they are interested in either platform, and absolutely not thinking about hopping from one to the other based on some imperceptible screen-refresh 'smoothness'.
  - klausa 2y ago
    That's... not what I said at all? The only claim I made is that if you toggle between 60/120hz on people's devices, they will be able to tell the difference.
  - jjcob 2y ago
    i used an android phone for a year with a 90 fps display. When I switched back to an iphone, it felt slow to me. i couldn't tell what the problem was, the brand new phone just felt sluggish. a year later when using my partners iphone pro, i realised that the sluggishness must be because of the refresh rate. i think once you get used to 90 or 120 fps, then 60fps will just feel choppy. no need to compare them side by side.
meindnoch 2y ago
If you try using a 60hz screen after a 120hz one, it will feel very sluggish and choppy. As long as you don't get used to 120hz, you'll be fine with 60hz.
- brk 2y ago
  I've never really felt this way, and have used all kinds of screens of various resolutions, sizes, technologies, etc. For 99% of the typical use cases (chats, email, doom scrolling, etc.) there just is not a big enough perceptible difference for most buyers. Screen refresh rate arguments are starting to have hints of audiophile discussions.
  - hnuser123456 2y ago
    I flatly will not buy any monitor, laptop, phone, tablet, or TV with a refresh rate below 120hz. I had 120hz 1080p over DVI-dual link in 2010. I can accept graphically demanding games going down to ~50 fps, but for UI interactivity and navigation, I'll take 120hz+ only.
    - mvanbaak 2y ago
      And there you are, watching a movie on that 120p+ tv. You do k ow the movie is only 24p right?
      - hnuser123456 2y ago
        I also (hopefully) don't have to interact with any UI while the movie is playing, but if I did, I'd want that UI running at 120hz. Maybe TV streamers will start advertising 120hz output soon. Maybe I should just replace my streamer with a spare PC that can output 120.
        volemo 2y ago
        > Maybe TV streamers will start advertising 120hz output soon. 120 Hz won’t make a difference on a TV box, imo, as abysmal state of their UI is far greater of a problem. High refresh rate is nothing when a transition takes seconds and when scroll is jittery even by 60 Hz standards. :(
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electrograv 2y ago
Yes, human visual perception exists along a spectrum of temporal, spatial, and chromatic resolution that varies from person to person — I’ve even met some people who can’t perceive the difference between 30hz and 120hz, while to me and most people I know, the difference between 60hz and 120hz is enormous. So you could make the same argument against high DPI displays, superior peak screen brightness, enormously better contrast ratio, color gamut, etc. Also speaker quality, keyboard quality, trackpad quality, etc. Where does this argument end? Do you propose we regress to 60hz 1080p displays with brightness, contrast, and viewing angles that are abysmal by modern standards? Or is the claim that the MacBook Air’s current screen is the perfect “sweet spot” beyond which >99% of people can’t tell the difference? I think the market data alone disproves this pretty conclusively. Clearly a significant enough percentage of the population cares enough about image quality to vote with their wallets so much so that enormous hardware industries continue to invest billions towards make any incremental progress in advancing the technology here. To be fair, I think there’s strong data to support that modern “retina”-grade DPI is good enough for >99% of people. And you can argue that XDR/HDR is not applicable/useful for coding or other tasks outside of photo/video viewing/editing (though for the latter it is enormously noticeable and not even remotely approaching human visual limits yet). But there’s plenty of people who find refresh rate differences extremely noticeable (usually up to at least 120hz), and I think almost anyone can easily notice moderate differences in contrast ratio and max brightness in a brightly lit room.
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- VincentEvans 2y ago
  Lol, reminds me of audiophile discussions when most people listen to youtube streaming a recompressed version of an mp3 someone uploaded.
  - toxik 2y ago
    It’s not imagined though, I use my partner’s phone sometimes and every time I used it I thought it was broken because the UI jitter was so jarring at 60Hz. Actually I’m still not convinced her phone isn’t broken. Also her flashlight resets to the lowest brightness EVERY time it’s cycled.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
It just feels more "fluid" and real, and then you get used to it and 60Hz feels jittery. I have an iPad pro, and its honestly made me consider going with an iPhone Pro (I still have just the non-pro model), although not quite yet. However, I notice a huge difference between scrolling on my phone and scrolling on my ipad. Its the same thing about retina vs. the previous resolutions we had put up with. Yes, you don't need them for text, but once you get used to it for text you don't want to go back.
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- pitkali 2y ago
  For me, the crisp text was the reason retina became a must.
alpaca128 2y ago
On smartphones you interact with the UI in a more direct way, which probably makes the input latency even more obvious. For me 120Hz is noticeable immediately when scrolling, though I also don’t find it important enough to warrant a higher price aside from gaming. What I find more important is a high pixel density, though on phones that’s less of an issue as with PC screens - I have yet to find one comparable to the ones in current iMacs.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
I switch between refresh rates ranging from 60hz and 240hz every day and while I certainly notice the difference, unless I’m running games I adjust and forget about it in seconds. While VRR 120hz+ on all Apple device screens would be nice it’s not exactly a dealbreaker… it’s not like rendering my IDE with 2x+ extra frames changes much of anything.
jofzar 2y ago
In seriously surprised you can't tell, it feels significantly smoother for me to see a high refresh rate display. 60hz just looks sluggish/slow and wrong to me now. I had a side by side of the same monitor (was at a lan) and was watching my friend play and couldn't understand why his game looked so laggy untill I realise he had high refresh rate off. Turned on 144hz and it was so much better
- aardvark179 2y ago
  That may have very little to do with refresh rate itself, and far more to do with the image processing and latency introduced by the monitor in different video modes.
minton 2y ago
I run Windows daily at work on a 60Hz display. I recently got my son a gaming PC complete with a 144Hz monitor. I was genuinely confused why Windows itself “felt” so much better. Just dragging windows around seemed like magic. It’s not that the UI is lagging on my machine, it’s more the smoothness of things when they move around. It makes everything seem faster, despite us timing various things and finding no actual performance differences.

petesergeant 2y ago

> I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share. They just look like old and slow phones to most normal people now Literally the only people I know with non-iPhones are: * People who can't afford one * People who want a folding screen * People who are conceptually anti-Apple Apple have over 50% market share in the US, talking about "struggling to obtain new market share" seems bizarre.

jghn 2y ago
* People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets
- nordsieck 2y ago
  > People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets It's my impression that Apple really tried to service this market - that last model was probably the iPhone 13 mini. I assume that there just isn't enough demand for smaller phones to justify the effort to develop them. I was honestly hoping that we'd get a small phone as the iPhone SE 4. But it seems like that's not to be. At least, if the 16e is the closest we'll get to an SE in the near term.
  - momoschili 2y ago
    yup, I bought a 13 mini and was happy that Apple was one of the companies that supported this form factor. That being said, the 13 mini sales numbers speak for themselves and I understand why this kind of phone isn't released every year. I'm holding out that Apple recognizes that most of the users of the 13 mini aren't serial upgraders and will continue refreshing the segment every 5 years or so
    - jghn 2y ago
      Yeah I'm holding out that they've decided to just refresh the small form factor on a slower cadence. I also have a 13 mini, we'll see how long I can hold out.
    - 2y ago

turtlesdown11 2y ago

>I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share Apple has >80% of the total operating profit in the smartphone market. The new entry level phone went up in price $200. Why do you think they do/should care about market share?

overstay8930 2y ago
Their stock price is currently suffering because of how poorly iPhones are doing in places with real competition (i.e. China), the iPhone 16 when put side by side with Chinese phones just makes the iPhone look like a cheap knock-off. Even 90hz would fix most of these problems (and the panel is more than capable of it). They're fixing it on the iPhone 17 because of the above reasons, but it shows how badly their market research teams are doing that they even remotely thought it was acceptable on the 15, let alone the 16.
- turtlesdown11 2y ago
  > poorly iPhones are doing in places with real competition (i.e. China) ah yes, a country famous for capitalist competition

wlesieutre 2y ago

Rumored to change next year https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-17-just-tipped-for-this-long-overdue-pro-upgrade https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-17-just-tipp... Would be nice if the laptops followed suit

whynotminot 2y ago

Have never heard anyone in my life that isn’t an engineer comment on Pro Motion. Not even in an accidental sort of “hmmm why does my phone just feel faster” kind of way. This is a feature that really only matters to the Hacker News crowd, and Apple is very aware of that. They invest their BOM into things the majority of people care about. And they do have the Pro Motion screens for the few that do. Even I — an engineer - regularly move between my Pro Motion enabled iPhone and my regular 60Hz iPad and while I notice it a little, I really just don’t see why this is the one hill people choose to die on.

electrograv 2y ago
You have to understand that your own perceptual experience is not identical to that of all other humans. Without recognizing that, we will inevitably end up talking past each other endlessly and writing each other off as { hallucinating, lying, exaggerating, etc } for one of us claiming to perceive something important that the other does not. It would be no different than arguing about whether we need all three primary colors (red, green, blue) with someone who is colorblind (and unaware of this). Or like arguing whether speakers benefit from being able to reproduce a certain frequency, with someone who is partially or fully deaf at that frequency. And I truly mean no disrespect to anyone with different perception abilities in these or any other domains. Recognizing that large differences exist here is essential to make sense of the reality - that something that seems completely unimportant or barely noticeable to you, could actually be a hugely obvious and important difference to many others (whether it’s a certain screen refresh rate, the presence of a primary color you cannot perceive but others can, an audio frequency you cannot hear but others can, or otherwise).
- whynotminot 2y ago
  This is why I led with this part, unrelated to my own perception: > Have never heard anyone in my life that isn’t an engineer comment on Pro Motion. Not even in an accidental sort of “hmmm why does my phone just feel faster” kind of way. I would also argue the crowd that insists everyone needs Pro Motion is doing exactly what you accuse me of -- assuming their needs and perception must also be everyone else's. When clearly the market has said otherwise, given Apple's success for many, many years with 60Hz screens.

0x457 2y ago

120Hz on Android IMO is: try once, say "damn that's smooth" and then disable to save battery life. I only ever used Pixels as android phones, so my experience is limited to that.

rizzaxc 2y ago
genuine question; why would you do that lol? phones easily get full day battery nowadays, and flagships get 2 day battery if your usage is anything but insane
- 0x457 2y ago
  The only way any phone gets more than 1 day of battery is when you don't use it. In which case, why you care that if it's 120 or 60hz. I'm back to iPhone now tho, so I get a full-day-ish with pro-motion under a normal usage.
Tarball10 2y ago
120Hz on Snapdragon/Mediatek Android phones works great with little impact to battery life. Pixels are hobbled by the poor power efficiency of their Tensor chips.

wordofx 2y ago

> but even non-tech people I know are wondering why Android phones run smoother than iPhones. Things that never happened. Lot of reasons to dislike. iPhone but this story isn’t true in the least.

presentation 2y ago

I don’t think I have a non technical friend who is ever comparing Android phones and iPhones, let alone noticing screen differences