Someone was complaining to me that Apple took a long time to add 120 Hz displays to phones. I didn't even know what my iPhone had, turns out it's 60 Hz cause it's a 12 mini. I've used 120 Hz displays before. Cannot tell the difference.

I'm sure there is a point of diminishing returns for display refresh rates, but I can tell you from experience that it is definitely higher than 60hz. 90hz feels meaningfully smoother (on a Steam deck), and 120/144hz (on a desktop monitor in my case) feels smoother than that. Even mouse input latency is perceptibly lower. I've never used a display faster than 144hz but I honestly would not be surprised to discover that one can still tell the difference well past 144hz.

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.

For doomscrolling or watching videos it makes little difference. For an iPad that advertises drawing with the pencil, the latency of the brushstroke is a massive difference between the two. The more immediate feedback unlocks more confidence and reduces a lot of friction.

From what I can tell, it's the thing they notice more than almost anything else. I was recently shopping for a new phone and my brother, who has no interest in tech, kept telling me I need to get the one with it (I forgot the exact term he used, it wasn't 120hz admittedly).

> I can barely get the regular people in my life to nice anything above 30 hz or turning off motion smoothing. I really don't see how any of this stuff matters for most people

"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.

I think Apple has held off 120 Hz for so long precisely because the average person gets a bit of a jolt of "this device is fast, it runs so smooth compared to..." they can't quite immediately place until someone explains it's the refresh rate.

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).

I would be surprised if >10% of people didn't notice a difference between 60Hz and 120Hz.

Whether the hardware can keep up with Liquid Glass and push 120 frames a second is a different story, of course.

You don't have to know what Hz is to see that scrolling on some devices is smooth and on other (coug..Apple) devices is choppy. 60Hz feels like a decade old phone.

Nobody ever wanted a >60Hz display, but once you've used one it's hard to go back. It's like having a higher-performance car. You're now stuck with paying more just for baseline happiness.

It's probably not actually as hard to go back as we think it is, but holding on to stuff is in our genes.

I think it only really matters for gamers, but seriously, who's gaming on an iPad?! Use a PC or console!