The US was never a trusted partner, Europeans just didn’t have a choice. No one company was able to spend the amount of money required to compete with American technology, so nobody did.
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
Again no Trump fan. But I’m glad that Trump policies have made at least the EU not to be so dependent on the US military itself and US military contractors. There is no private company monopoly including BigTech that I can’t extricate myself away from quite easily.
It’s much harder to extricate yourself from the US influence on the world stage.
Not that I’m not seriously looking at a Plan B outside of the US after I retire. We are already planning to spend a few months a year between Costa Rica snd Panama City next year - warm, safe countries in US time zones.
That dependence on the US was by design of the US however. With all the military assistance they provided they also bought influence (which they will lose now of course). This paid itself back in many ways, like the dollar being the world reserve currency, having bases all over the world, being free to invade countries like Iraq etc.
Personally I hope the EU works more on the nuclear umbrella. It was the US that didn't really want us to have much of our own to establish dependency on them, but now that the US has become an unreliable partner we'll have to. France and perhaps the UK will have to scale theirs up. It's the only thing where we really need the US militarily, as any regular military is not sufficient to deter enemies like Russia and China, no matter how much we have.
But Big Tech is very hard to cut until the EU clouds step up a lot more. Maybe not for you yourself personally but for industry.
I mean even putting the politics aside, you do kind of ask for this to happen when you start putting actual pressure on real people. Someone was eventually going to do something about this.
Pretty authoritarian but it's not like this just didn't happen under previous administrations. It just didn't happen publicly. You could definitely get someone visiting you at your door if you made apps that make certain things too easy.
Only under authoritarian governments would one expect something like this.
Real police would not be alarmed at having their presence noted. Secret police that are masked up to avoid identification, and equipped with more military equipment than was typical for daytime patrol by soldiers in Fallujah is not anything like what happened under prior administrations.
The US government made them tie their hands behind their back a few years ago, NHTSA tried to shut down the company so they rebranded their then Comma 2 as a dashcam that might be able to drive your car.
These guys are massive scammers, I worked with them over multiple projects and the only thing I remember is by the end of each one, everyone was memeing on them for how poorly made everything they did was.
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.
> 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".)
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.
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.
If the UI jitter on their phone was "so jarring", it's not because it's 60 Hz. It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.
Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring". And that's at less than half the rate we're even talking about! Similarly, even if you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz, it's not jarring. It's not jittery. It's pretty subtle, honestly. You can notice it if you're paying attention, but you'd never in a million years call it "jarring".
I think a lot of people might be confusing 60 Hz with jittery UX that has nothing to do with the display refresh rate. Just because the display operates at a higher refresh rate doesn't mean the CPU is actually refreshing the interface at that rate. And with certain apps or with whatever happening in the background, it isn't.
> Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring". And that's at less than half the rate we're even talking about!
Those have motion blur.
> Similarly, even if you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz
I don't know why you're phrasing this so oddly doubtful? Being able to tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz is hardly uncommon. It's quite a large difference, and this is quite well studied.
> If the UI jitter on their phone was "so jarring", it's not because it's 60 Hz. It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.
No, it's not. This isn't about dropped frames or micro-stutters caused by the CPU. It's about _motion clarity_.
You can follow the objects moving around on the screen much better, and the perceived motion is much smoother because there is literally twice the information hitting your eyes.
You can make a simple experiment — just change your current monitor to 30hz and move the mouse around.
Does it _feel_ different? Is the motion less smooth?
It's not because your computer is suddenly struggling to hit half of the frames it was hitting before; it's because you have less _motion information_ hitting your eyes (and the increased input lag; but that's a separate conversation).
60->120fps is less noticeable than 30->60fps; but for many, many people it is absolutely very clearly noticable.
> Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring".
People absolutely complain about jitter in 24fps content on high-end displays with fast response times; it is especially noticeable in slow panning shots.
Google "oled 24fps stutter" to see people complaining about this.
It's literally why motion smoothing exists on TVs.
If you switch from 60hz to 30hz you absolutely notice. I wouldn’t think it’s wrong to say it is jarring.
30hz is still perfectly usable, but you constantly feel as if something is off. Like maybe you have a process running in the background eating all your CPU.
I imagine going from 120hz to 60hz is the same thing. It should be theoretically indistinguishable, but it’s noticeable.
That's bs. You will immediately notice the difference when going from let's say 120 hz down to 60 hz on a fast gaming pc even if you're just dragging windows around. Everything feels jarring to say the least compared to higher refresh rates and it has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU. It's because of the refresh rate.
It's same thing going from 120 hz to 60 hz on a phone while scrolling and swiping.
It's quite interesting though that there are people out there who won't notice the huge difference. But hey, at least they don't have to pay premium for the increase performance of the screen.
It’s deeply flawed logic at best (or an intentional red herring at worst) to cite the existence of pseudoscience discussed elsewhere, as an argument against real science being discussed here.
There is a well-understood science to both auditory and visual perception, even more concretely so for the visual side. The scientific literature on human perception in both categories is actively used in the engineering of almost every modern (audible/visual) device you use every day (both in hardware design, and software such as the design of lossy compression algorithms). We have very precise scientific understanding of the limits (and individual variation) of human visual and (to a slightly lesser extent) auditory perception and preferences.
That’s why I specifically emphasized “perception and preferences”. Believe it or not, the science covers both - both what people can perceive, and what people care about and value.
It continues to amaze me years later how many people happily enjoyed watching 4:3 content stretched to 16:9, before 4:3 mostly disappeared from broadcasts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. :(
That's actually not a bad recommendation if you want to keep sanity as a tech enthusiast :). Otherwise you start noticing how much stuff still hasn't been upgraded to support high dpi and high refresh rate and you can't go back
The good news is that human brain is amazing and will probably revert to reasonable perception if you use your non retina 60Hz screen for long enough :)
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)
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.
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.
It's baffling to me that some people claim to not see the difference. It's literally light and day to me. It's like someone looking at a low DPI screen and a high DPI screen and not being able to tell the difference.
Same. The suggestion that it’s like audiophiles totally missed the mark, because lots of audiophile claims do not stand up to double blind tests. I can guarantee that 60 vs 120 hz blind tests would be insanely easy to pass if there was window movement or scrolling or basically anything but static frames.
Are you sure the underlying application and the OS are even rendering 120Hz all the time? The panel being able to was enough to convince some people they're seeing "smooth scrolling" when it was actually 60Hz saving battery. That's the analogy to audiophiles.
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.
I'm generally ok with 60Hz (the difference isn't that significant to me). But I can definitely see the difference in a head-to-head comparison with fast moving content. The easiest way to see it for me was to move the cursor around quickly. With 60Hz there are much more visible "jumps" between positions. With 120Hz it animates much more smoothly.
In this case it really is just you. I can tell a high-refresh-rate display from across the room. I can tell if someone’s iPhone is a Pro even if the person is sitting five meters away from me on a moving bus.
On the other hand, my MacBook has a 120 Hz display and both my iPad Mini and iPhone Mini are 60 Hz, and even though the difference is night and day, I don’t really MIND using them. It’s just not that cool.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
I am not seeing this alleged crowd of people insisting that everyone needs 120hz/ProMotion. This seems to be a red herring.
I am seeing a crowd of people (including myself) saying that we experience 120hz/ProMotion as a huge improvement over 60hz, so much so that we will never buy a product without this ever again (so long as we have the choice).
I furthermore claim that while not everyone is a member of this crowd (obviously), it represents a sufficiently large share of the device-buying population to justify steering billions of dollars of hardware and software industry to support this, which evidently has happened and increasingly continues to happen.
If this crowd were an insignificant minority as you seem to imply, then 120hz displays would be a fad that fades away in all but the most niche markets (e.g. pro gaming), and yet we’re seeing precisely the opposite happen — 120hz displays are growing in popularity by expanding broadly into increasingly non-niche consumer device products everywhere, from laptops to tablets to phones.
> When clearly the market has said otherwise, given Apple's success for many, many years with 60Hz screens.
Arguing that the market doesn’t want/need it now because Apple succeeded without it in the past, is completely absurd — just as nonsensical as trying to argue that computers don’t ever need any more memory because they sold just fine with less in the past.
Well I guess if you don’t see it it doesn’t exist.
Apple sells Pro Motion displays. If it matters to you, you can buy them. They aren’t refusing to serve this market, they just don’t prioritize it with their lower cost products.
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.
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
>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?
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.
> 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.
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
> 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
I loved my iPhone 13 mini for the 3-years it was my daily driver. But yeah, the mini line is probably dead.
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.
I was curious about the SE4 since I had an SE2 and Verizon let me trade in the SE2 for the SE3 for free. Based on the rumors of what the SE4 was going to be, we did get an SE4, it was just rebranded as the 16e. The rumor was they were gonna get rid of the button and go with the more recent iPhone style and such. I wonder if they will rebrand the Apple Watch SE as an Apple Watch 10e or something along those lines.
Unfortunately the 12 and 13 mini were badly timed when stores closed for COVID. Actually holding one of them to use it is really what sells the smaller size, IMO.
I have my 12 mini still but it’s showing its age. Probably have to suck it up and get a big phone next upgrade.
Where do they go? Apart from random Chinese vendors like Unihertz who sell low-spec devices and you're lucky if you get one version update, the smallest Android phones I've seen are Samsung Galaxy phones, which are about the same size as an iPhone 16. Asus and Sony used to make small phones, but they've stopped in the last couple of years in favor of making phablets.
Interesting, although in my head I’d class that in the same way as the folding screens; iPhones that don’t have the dimensions you want, one way or another
I have an Android phone. I could afford an iPhone, I don't care about folding screens, and my laptop is a MacBook Pro. I have an Android phone (1) because a substantial fraction of what I do on my phone is browsing the web, and Android lets me run Firefox which has markedly better ad-blocking, (2) because the phone I had before this one was an Android phone (mostly for reason 1, as it happens, but that's not particularly important here) and switching is inconvenient, and (3) because one of the reasons why I could easily afford an iPhone if I wanted one is that I have always preferred not to spend money for which I don't get substantial benefit, and it doesn't look to me as if iPhones are so much better than Android phones as to be worth paying a premium for.
This may be partly because I'm not in the US; my impression is that "people who can afford iPhones buy iPhones so if you don't you're impoverished or weird" is much more a thing in the US than in Europe.)
(I also thought "struggling to obtain new market share" was a weird take, and ditto "just look like old and slow phones". I am not disagreeing with that part of what you posted.)
* People who think a phone is a boring generic device, and it doesn't make sense to prefer any particular brand or pay more than $X.
* People who are used to Android and have better things to do than migrating to another ecosystem.
In the past, the lack of proper dual-SIM iPhones was a common enough reason to prefer Android. But it's less of an issue today, as eSIMs have become mainstream.
In a highly competitive environment everyone wants to show their blue upper-middleclass bubble.
I think it's sad that something kids can't control becomes such a social anxiety inducing thing forcing parents into buying something they might not be able to afford.
Luckily where I'm from we don't use the "sms app" to communicate
Russia is basically calling the West's bluff that they won't use nukes to enforce their ideology and Russia won. Everyone wants to talk big until it comes time to actually enforce words.
> I don't think the West ever threatened a nuclear response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
I think so, too, but I also think it’s likely that, through silent diplomacy, there was a clear message “if you nuke the Ukraine, there will be a response in kind”.
Without the USA, it’s hard to keep that message, though. Neither England nor France can respond in kind to a tactical nuclear weapon, as they don’t have any.
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.