Eye strain/pain headaches with MacBook Pro 14 2023

I had been experiencing the same struggle for a very long time with my MBP 14'' until I did the following 3 things which seem to have solved the problem (fingers crossed, watching out for symptoms, but all seems well so far. Hoping and praying this fixes it once and for all...). I hope these tips help others who are struggling with the same issue.

1. Add a blue light/UV filter to the laptop
2. Change the preset to Internet and Web (sRGB)
3. Change the refresh rate to 60 Hz to exactly/closely match what I've been used to all my life.

I think my eyes were sensitive to the temporal dithering used for color depth and the adaptive/variable refresh rate that the ProMotion preset uses. I am not sure if PWM is disabled in the sRGB preset (but the brightness level seems to have been fixed now).

I had struggled with this for a very long time and had dreaded working on my laptop without an external monitor, and once these 3 things clicked, it almost felt like my laptop was much easier on my eyes. I hope Apple provides a little more customer care for issues like these, and make their hardware specifications more transparent so that people can quickly find what works best for their eyes!

BobTheFisherman wrote:

I use reading glasses when using the computer. Works very well for me. If you wear prescription glasses, check with your optometrist. They may be able to give you a prescription for glasses to wear when using the computer.

When I actually went to the eye doctor for reading glasses, as opposed to buying them in bulk on Amazon, I got progressive lenses that have a section in the middle for looking at computers and one at the bottom for reading. It's not perfect but it's pretty darn good now that I'm used to them.

I do get headaches when I use Macbook Pro 16 M2. I think there is something seriously wrong with these mini LED screens. I know headaches are typical symptom of using screens with PWM, but for me, I have never had this before with any laptop screen before in my life, and I'm an avid tech user, so I must have used more than 20 laptops so far. No other laptops, even the ones with OLED screens (which typically uses PWMs) have given me this headache.

I know that Macbook pros have horrendous response time (not refresh rate). I wonder if this is combination of the extremely slow response time + PWM. Or maybe it is dithering, it is hard to determine.

Anyway, my recommendation is just get a different machine if possible. Otherwise, PWM should be less pronounced as you increase brightness, so I use my MBP at max brightness all the time.

Anyway, after the butterfly keyboard fiasco, with this, I am really annoyed with Apple devices.

[Edited by Moderator]

on displays that use Pulse Width Modulation, the backlight Brightness is inherently fully bright, and it is switched OFF more and more frequently to get lower backlight levels.

Backlight switching/flashing is more intense when the brightness level is LOW.

Completely counter-intuitively, Dark mode is likely to be much worse than Light mode, and dim is likely to be much more flashing and dithering that Bright.

You can download Blackmagic Cam on your iPhone and change the shutter to 1/8000 to see if there are any PWM in sRGB mode. It's quite easy to catch by the light/dark ripple. I turned off Temporal Dithering with BetterDisplay, but I wasn't willing to use sRGB preset because I need the adaptive brightness. Now I'm using external displays and avoid looking at the MBP. Most regret thing ever. Probably will get a Razer Blade next.

This article discusses testing a slightly older MacBook Pro and finds that it uses Pulse-Width Modulation to turn the backlight on and off to control brightness. Their testing concluded that the modulation frequency was extremely high, 117 KHz, and should have no impact on users' vision.

They also discovered that above 75 percent brightness, all Modulation disappeared.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-2020-Retina-Display-still-uses-PWM.459581.0.html

FLICKERING IS WORSE AT LOW BRIGHTNESS.

TURN UP THE BRIGHTNESS TO REDUCE FLICKERING.

Try to use Photography color profile with Pro motion frequency.

Also in terminal:

defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool 1

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

I spent a lot of time to find this.

FLICKERING IS WORSE AT LOW BRIGHTNESS.

TURN UP THE BRIGHTNESS TO REDUCE FLICKERING.

On macbook pro m2 it's installed with system in my case. Settings - Display - color profile - Photography

Adding to this: Ive switched the screen settings to "Photography Editing Mode" now, its capped at 100 nits brightness and some other settings. I feel like I have a lot less issues now.

Apple is not here on these forums. We are just other regular users such as yourself.

If you want to get the attention of Apple, then write a letter to their corporate offices.

Contact - How to Contact Us - Apple

You can also provide product feedback here (Apple won't respond to feedback with this link):

Product Feedback - Apple

I think it's not an apple issue, it's a panel issue, i measure all the other brands and they gave me the same pain, headache, eye burn e.t.c., we can think about that apple or other brands uses cheap panels that decreases the cost but when i measure, high end models gave me exactly the same eye health issues also the other brands did so, I don't know it's because of led, oled, color algorithm, flicker, dithering, blurry text smoothing e.t.c. but it kills a lot of people's work and study performance.  The brand that fix the problem because this is a problem that so many people didn't notice yet, i think it will improve the sales performance. May be sales guys may have a look at this topic.

You will  feel exactly the same sympthoms when you use an iphone or a high end android phone only the time will make the differrence. You have a strain when you use an iphone in 20 minutes, you will have a strain in 30 minutes whe you use an android phone,  Vesa display or panthone validated screen only gave us time. Oled, qled, neoled tv will give you the exact pain if mac gives you the pain. Some guys peacefully try to hack the system but nothing is changed, because it is not a software issue. When you try to change srgb, color filter or something else you must restart your mac. Because the algorithym of screen panel i think the best in market, the tone, the true color etc. Apple engineers exactly know the issue i think because they use a lot of macs at work, they found a temporary solution  and create an algorythm that works, This thing starts from real liquid crystal panels to led transition. i had a led vaio once in a while, it gave me strain not in 20 minutes but 2 hours or long. I think this is the Led that gaves us pain. When you see some people in the tv news that telling some opinions about their topic, you can see red eyes, strained eyes, some lost eye seight because of lots screen reading. Oled ipads and macs are coming in the future, so i hope apple know-how will fix this because when they come, they come huge.

I am currently experiencing the same issue, my eyeballs get very itchy and red with severe pain the next morning whenever I use my laptop at night.

I recently got MacBook Pro M2 14-Inch 2023 16GB RAM 1TB, First I was very excited thinking I got my worth for the money but little did I know I will be totally discouraged.

I am very afraid now, my eyes' health is deteriorating. I think Apple should look into this issues before it gets out of hand.

I was using MacBook AIr, and I never had this issue.

system Preferences > Displays ...

... choose a scaled resolution that makes TEXT big enough for you.

Safari

Preferences > Advanced ...

... never use font sizes smaller than nnn

..Try 18, if too big, you can select the box and TYPE. ( I use 16 ).

This is a nightmare with almost any recent-ish apple devices (I'm stuck with iPad pro 2018 on iOS 15 as iOS 16 was terrible, probably due to dithering, and i cant use any iPhone due to dithering+pwm), and many other oled devices...i hope this technology will be replaced asap, but don't keep my hopes up