The ProMotion setting in display settings is adaptive refresh rate, it's not a fixed 120Hz refresh rate. Is there not an option to set the Macbook Pro to a fixed rate 120Hz? I understand this would lower the battery life but honestly the battery life is so amazing on this thing that it wouldn't be a problem for me. They could just put a little warning bubble that says "fixed 120Hz refresh rate will result in lower battery life. Continue?"

At the very least they should give us the option of having the display go up to fixed 120Hz refresh rate when running off wall power...

Not an apple thing to do…

Hopefully they do give us this option soon. This is a laptop aimed at professionals after all... When it's plugged into wall power, you should be able to have it at a fixed 120Hz refresh rate instead of adaptive/variable refresh rate. Windows 11 lets you do this with the 'Surface laptop studio' and Surface pro 8...

None that I know off. Any reason as to why you need it?

bryanrs said:

The ProMotion setting in display settings is adaptive refresh rate, it's not a fixed 120Hz refresh rate. Is there not an option to set the Macbook Pro to a fixed rate 120Hz? I understand this would lower the battery life but honestly the battery life is so amazing on this thing that it wouldn't be a problem for me. They could just put a little warning bubble that says "fixed 120Hz refresh rate will result in lower battery life. Continue?"

At the very least they should give us the option of having the display go up to fixed 120Hz refresh rate when running off wall power...

I think the problem you are experiencing has nothing to do with ProMotion. You want the 120hz refresh rate to be on all the time because you probably feel like you don't feel the screen is as smooth as it should be??

This is not caused by the refresh rate but the poor response time of the mini led screen. It causes text blur even at high refresh rate.

Apple will never allow a toggle for Pro-Motion because it won't change your perception of the screen and it adjusts to what you are doing faster than you can tell. In theory it adjusts so fast when you can benefit from higher refresh rate it is already there and when you don't it has already clocked down. It is imperceptible.

This is the advantage of Pro-Motion. If you look at an iPhone with Pro-Motion the screen always feels and looks smooth no matter what you are doing. Compare the screen of an iPhone with Pro-Motion to your MBP and you will see what I am talking about. On the Phone it will always look smooth vs. the Laptop which doesn't always look smooth and this has nothing to do with Pro-Motion but the screen technology in the two devices and the respective response times.

Technerd108 said:

I think the problem you are experiencing has nothing to do with ProMotion. You want the 120hz refresh rate to be on all the time because you probably feel like you don't feel the screen is as smooth as it should be??

This is not caused by the refresh rate but the poor response time of the mini led screen. It causes text blur even at high refresh rate.

Apple will never allow a toggle for Pro-Motion because it won't change your perception of the screen and it adjusts to what you are doing faster than you can tell. In theory it adjusts so fast when you can benefit from higher refresh rate it is already there and when you don't it has already clocked down. It is imperceptible.

This is the advantage of Pro-Motion. If you look at an iPhone with Pro-Motion the screen always feels and looks smooth no matter what you are doing. Compare the screen of an iPhone with Pro-Motion to your MBP and you will see what I am talking about. On the Phone it will always look smooth vs. the Laptop which doesn't always look smooth and this has nothing to do with Pro-Motion but the screen technology in the two devices and the respective response times.

Click to expand...

But the iPhone 12, which is a 60Hz OLED, always feels and looks smooth as well... The problem with these adaptive frame rate implementations is that, yes, even though the iPhone 13 Pro and 14 Pro always look smooth (just like the iPhone 12), you can still see and 'feel' that it's not quite 120Hz all the time. To say it's imperceptible is just not true! On the iPhone 13 Pro/14 Pro you notice it mostly when you start scrolling. If the screen is static long enough the display goes down to 60Hz, and when you start scrolling it does take a moment to ramp up above 60Hz. To make it truly imperceptible, they would have to switch the refresh rate from 60Hz to 120Hz in less than 8.3ms and I don't think this is even possible at the moment. If it is, Apple hasn't implemented this in the iPhone 13 Pro or 14 Pro yet.

You may be right about the stupid mini LED display on the macbook pro though. Which means we have 2 different things contributing to the 2nd class quasi-120Hz experience on the MacBook Pro: mini LED AND we're forced to have "adaptive" refresh rate instead of a fixed 120Hz refresh rate.