All iPhone 17 models let you completely turn off PWM dimming

Yesterday, Apple unveiled the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air. All of them come with many new features and specs, but one interesting setting wasn’t talked about during the presentation – though maybe it should have been.

We’re talking about using pulse width modulation (PWM) for dimming the screen, which basically means the screen is quickly turned off and then on again. This, rather understandably, causes some sensitive people eye strain, headaches, and other symptoms, especially when it’s taking place at a low rate. Apple now has a solution.

The company has so far been one of the worst offenders on this front, with incredibly low PWM levels. That hasn’t changed, but now you can simply turn PWM off entirely. You just go to Accessibility settings and find the one labeled Display Pulse Smoothing. Here’s the description of the feature:

Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions.

This will surely be a godsend for those sensitive to low PWM rates, and it’s better than nothing. On the Android side, most companies that aren’t Samsung and Google have tried to mitigate the issue by offering extremely high PWM rates, which seem to not affect as many people.

And now we’re left wondering why we can’t just have both of these in the same device – have a very high PWM rate, but also make it so the user can turn it off entirely if even that is causing issues. Maybe in the future, here’s hoping.

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