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Comment by 6t6t6t6 | Hacker News Reader

I have some kind of "flickering sensitivity" (if this is a thing). I bought a retina MBP about 4-5 years ago and I had to return it because it was killing me. After 30 minutes watching the screen, I had terrible headaches and my vision was becoming blury for the next hours.

Now I have a new (2017) MBP and I don't have any problem anymore, so I guess that they improved the technology somehow.

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Plasma TVs do it to me also. It used to drive me nuts to go into a Best Buy and look at a wall of plasma TVs.

Looking up the retina displays, I see they are either IPS or OLED. The IPS likely has an LED backlight, and OLED is...LED. So a flicker is possible if they used PWM to limit the current to the LEDs.

Did you notice any change in the effect at different brightness levels?

The only Apple device with an OLED screen is the iPhone X; the built-in displays on the 2012-2015 retina MacBook Pros as well as the ones made after the 2016 redesign are IPS with a 60hz refresh rate. There were issues with the graphics on the mid 2012 to early 2013 retina MacBook Pros - perhaps the parent got one of the defective models.

> The only Apple device with an OLED screen is the iPhone X

I think the iWatch also has an OLED panel.

All three of them do! I'm not sure how it slipped my mind. Thankfully, Cunningham's Law [1].

[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

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