Hi there,

for some time now I can successfully use an iPad Pro 11inch with M2 chip. I disabled Promotion, Truetone and Nightshift. So this seems to get the flicker down.

I use iPadOS 16.6.1.

I gave iPadOS 17.0 a shot and had to revert immediately to 16.6.1. This is much easier on the eyes. As in many cases, the new version looks sharper and crisper but is giving me a headache after a longer period of time.

Hope that helps someone

5 days later
deepflame changed the title to iOS/iPadOS 17 .

Same with an iPhone 11 which was good for my eyes. Upgraded from 16.6.1 to 17.0.1 and have the same reaction. Text seems sharper but it is hard to focus on and strains the eyes after some seconds already.

Good that it is still possible to downgrade to iOS 16.

Anyone having the same experiences with the iOS 17 upgrade?

I noticed it immediately with iOS 17.0 as well on my iPhone SE 2020, as compared to 16.6.1.

I also noticed less comfort on beta versions of macOS 14, as compared to 13.5.2.

9 days later

It's discouraging that Apple seems to be going backwards on all this stuff

8 months later

The cause is the screen sharpening algorithm. As you said, iOS 17 is sharper and crisp. This means the screen sharpness has been tuned higher on 17.

I've been using an iPad Pro 2018 (LCD, no PWM) for 6 years. iPadOS 13 gives me eye strain, nausea. But after updating to 16.3.1, I felt totally fine and noticed the content became blurrer than before, which means the sharpness of the screen has been tuned down. However after updating to 17.4.1, I feel nausea again, similar to iPadOS 13, the screen is abnormally sharp and crisp as before.

I assume they use some pixel-wise temporal algorithm to achieve such high screen sharpness. It's aggressive to sensitive persons.

I'm writing feedbacks to Apple now, hoping they could abandon the current way to sharpen screen contents, and fallback to the old way on 16.3.1.

    a month later

    Neuronum

    Did you ever get any response from Apple on this? I have very similar issues in terms of nausea and bad feeling with various versions of iOS. I summarized this in a post a few months ago:

    https://ledstrain.org/d/2683-severe-symptoms-updating-old-iphone-started-a-summary-of-goodbad-versions

    Strangely it looks like iOS 16.3.1 did not work for me when I tried it on an iPad 6th generation. As far as I can tell the last knows good version for me is iOS 16.1.1. I use that on my iPhone SE 3 and have not updated.

      ocean10 Did you ever get any response from Apple on this?

      Although I may be stating the obvious. I highly doubt customer service personnel at a company as "siloed" as Apple are able to propose engineering changes as a result of customer complaints.

        JTL probably true but can’t hurt I guess. Maybe more people than we realize have this issue. I had some correspondence with someone after emailing through their Accessibility contact form. Didn’t get any real specific or helpful response (said would pass on to appropriate team) but at least it was more then a form response.

        ocean10 No, I have not received any response from Apple. I wrote feedback to them when I was using iPadOS 13 and 14 (feedback page: https://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad/). I didn't try iPadOS 15. Then I updated to iPadOS 16.3.1 last year, this version is very comfortable for me. Maybe they've read those feedback.

        dev