Phones use VRR displays, they don't always scale up all the way to 120Hz, only when justified by the content.

What's magical about 60 there? I'd naively think you'd just want VRR and some power saving render rate behavior rather than a fixed target framerate equal to the max framerate for all types of content all the time. The latter gives you neither good power saving nor good experience in most combinations.

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.

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.

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!

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.

> I suspect they are going to drip feed it through their products as a cheap spec bump (vs adding extra RAM or storage).

The iPhone sells way more units than the iPad, so it makes sense that it's not a feature for the iPad mini yet.

Or this will be an anomaly and they'll drop the base iPhone and keep the E model for the new base, the Air, the Pro and now the Duo.

Sure, but the parent comment is saying the “matter of time” should be in the past. I wouldn’t buy a 60hz device today.

Apple introduced Tandem OLED there is a difference most of the PC world is still using single OLED with all its shortcomings along with Thunderbolt 4.

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.

I'm one of those who can't spot a difference. I've tried to with the mouse trick or scrolling and I just can't see it. I can see the difference between 30fps and 60fps but anything north of 60fps is imperceptible to me. Maybe it's from a lifetime of gaming on toaster specs where I'd scarcely break 25fps.

I think another thing to keep in mind is that there’s probably an element of sensory adaptation at play here. Like when you wear a watch: you notice it at first, and then you don’t notice it on your wrist anymore.

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.

Why? Reference monitors in the production industry aren't.