I'm testing as many MacBooks as possible. Here are the results.

Link I'm starting to wonder has my brain trained to a specific flicker or dithering pattern and others are now uncomfortable

Lauda89 That is very interesting. Here's a few ideas/questions:

1. The flicker rate on your iPhone X is 250 hz (it flickers every 4 ms), which is well above the level that most people will get headaches. So maybe you're not sensitive to OLED flicker or any kind of flickering at high speeds (say, 100 hz or higher).

2. So if you ignore the huge dips and just focus on the top line of the graphs, you'll see a correlation between headaches and the variability of the graphs. Note that when comparing these graphs, you have to keep in mind that they have different scales for the Y axis, so you have to imagine what the graphs would look like if they had the same scale.

   
   

   Iphone X (no headaches, pretty flat if you imagine what the graph would look like if the Y axis went up to 250 and not just 100.)

   

   
   

   Macbook (no headaches, pretty flat)

   

   
   

   Gaming pc (headaches, pretty ragged)

   

3. I find it really interesting that the output from your Macbook and gaming PC have different brightness levels and that the gaming PC has a more ragged line than the Macbook. I would start looking for differences in how the display works. I think you'd mentioned that one of them connects via HDMI and the other via DisplayPort. That could be worth experimenting with. But also you could look in the monitor settings (are these devices somehow using different monitor settings?). And also for the graphics card you could play around with different settings like make sure you turn off "eye care" and blue light filters and things like that. The good news is you can make various changes and test them immediately with your light meter.

4. Testing with other colors, especially light gray and light green could be interesting. Something called pixel inversion happens at 30 hz and many monitors flicker worst with light colors vs pure white.

Lauda89 Oh, and have you tried turning off your discrete graphics card and using your integrated graphics card on your gaming PC?

@Lauda89 On the iPhone X, change the brightness slider to 50% and run that test again. The modulation depth will be different.

@NewDwarf thanks again for your help on this!! I have a Rx 5600 Xt in an EGPU exclosure do you know what commands I'd need to disable dithering on that please?

DigDeal Sorry to hear the firmware downgrade did not work for you. I wish there were better methods for empirical measurements of these problems (I see there are some hopeful developments in other threads here recently). Because of this, it can be hard to determine whether some irreversible changes are occurring during software updates (not limited to the main firmware), or if our brains now associate the whole device with being a threat, even after reverting to the previous, tolerable state. I hope our continued research here will ultimately bring some clarity.

@GBowler noted different levels of eye strain between two identical MacBook models with different installed firmware versions. I also have several MacBooks of the same year (2015), which all had recent firmware versions, but among them I find certain screens more tolerable than others. So, while firmware remains a possible factor, I am currently leaning more toward attributing my personal issues to panel variations.

i think laptops with ips lcd screens would cause the least eyestrain?

macsforme you could check the display panel of your Mac with the following command:

ioreg -lw0 | grep \"EDID\" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

RobC Unfortunately, all display EDID values for this MacBook model/year appear to be identical. My understanding is that Apple removed the ability to see the display model/vendor after people were returning earlier retina MacBook models which did not come with a display from their preferred vendor.

macsforme I have been investigating reports of eye strain on MacBooks being triggered by a firmware/OS update. I also bought a few tools to dump and flash different firmware versions on MacBooks (specifically testing the MacBooks I have, which are mid 2015 15-inch Pro models, both with and without the discrete AMD GPU). So far I cannot pin down the issue, but there have been several reports like yours and I plan to keep investigating. A GPU VBIOS update seems the most plausible.

This might not be possible, because it requires a "known good" system of the same model but in that case it might be possible to compare firmware dumps between a "bad" versus "good" system and potentially identify what's different.

From what I remember (almost) all laptops integrate the GPU VBIOS into the UEFI ROM image, as opposed to desktop GPUs where the GPU VBIOS is flashed onto a separate chip, so identifying or changing the VBIOS in use can be done with external tools.

DigDeal Maybe this is how they increase sales? Got eye strain, aha, need better product? I mean this sounds ridiculous but in this world I am surprised day by day as to what is possible when you have weak CEO and very pushy board.

RobC Here you go, under the marketing layer, there is the same or maybe even worse situation than in PC market. Does Dell have the same problem ?

macsforme yeah, pretty sure at that stage it's at least partially psychological. I'm literally scared to update any usable device at this point.

Interesting note, again proving my point that it's 100% software related, is that using "safe mode" makes it tolerable. Not ideal, but not as harsh as in regular mode. Most likely some sort of hardware acceleration is disabled.

Donux yeah well this plan backfired lol. I'm not buying another Mac, thank you. At least on Windows I could make a backup and roll back drivers and software on my own if needed.

Hunter20

Here's AHKinject_SCN078.dmg

https://mas-fx.filemail.com/d/sofofeusdcicyvs

Really interested if this works for you. Please report back! I tried on a 2019 16" MBP with Sonoma and didn't seem to work. See above. Let us know if this works on your 15"!

RobC I currently have four of these machines. All four return only "Color LCD" for that command. Three of the four (including the one I subjectively find most comfortable) return the exact same entire EDID string, while the fourth is not a byte-for-byte match but when parsed by edid-decode all values still appear to be the same. If the ability to see more panel info returned on later Macs, that is good news and may be helpful to us here.

JTL I suspect you are right about VBIOS being stored on the main firmware chip (especially the Intel integrated VBIOS, but likely the discrete AMD VBIOS as well). My initial tests consisted of reconstructing an old firmware image (with some help from some guys on the MacRumors forums) from a combination of donor dumps found online and Apple's own .fd firmware images from their macOS installers (specifically an old version from the El Capitan era). While this seems like it should include an older GPU VBIOS, my preliminary testing did not seem to show any differences in GPU info listed in the OS between old and new firmware versions on this model (although there is still more testing to do). Also interestingly, someone on this board (maybe you? ) found an "AMDFirmware" update script in macOS installers, which seemingly suggests an AMD VBIOS update outside of the main firmware, but that could also be for different GPU models (such as those in desktop machines).

macsforme Did you tried with the following version of the command?

ioreg -lw0 | grep IODisplayEDID | sed "/[^<]*</s///"

If you put every answer line into an edid-decoder like this one: https://hverkuil.home.xs4all.nl/edid-decode/edid-decode.html you could get much more details of your panels, like the vendor and date in which they were manufactured among others.