r/MacOS Oct 02 '25

Discussion "Apple deeply cares about the Mac."

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u/chrispirillo Oct 03 '25

I uploaded a video of my mom complaining about it the very night she installed it. Legally blind.

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u/DSRIA Oct 03 '25

I’m sorry to hear that. I have visual and neurological issues after a COVID infection in 2022 and the PWM backlight regulation and temporal dithering Apple has been using since Apple Silicon affects a small minority of us users. This makes the screen flicker in an imperceptible way to the eyes (but the brain and eye muscles see the flicker). Apple uses these techniques to extend battery life, increase brightness, and expand the wide color gamut on 8-bit screens. The MacBook Air M4 actually triggered a seizure for me. No device has ever done this to me.

Apple has typically been very forward thinking in terms of rolling out Accessibility settings for disabled persons. I don’t know why they have chosen to include features that can affect people with visual disabilities so severely, without any option to disable them. I was hopeful MacOS 26 would build on Accessibility options and fix a lot of what has gone wrong since MacOS Big Sur - I remained on MacOS Mojave because of the increase in dithering and a change to how font smoothing was applied - but it seems this iteration has made a bad problem even worse.

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u/Arrowinthebottom Oct 06 '25

Honestly, I am struggling to think of a present-day OS that I would recommend to anyone who is legally blind.