Last year’s iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max were the first iPhones to feature a high refresh rate of 120Hz to allow the display to refresh twice as fast as 60Hz screens to make moving content look smoother and faster.
One limitation is that the phones are only capable of scaling down the refresh rate to 10Hz, which is presumably why they don’t have the always-on display feature.
On the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, the always-on functionality will presumably let you view widgets displaying battery levels, alarms, weather, calendars, and other information while the screen remains at a low brightness level. It will be possible to enable a setting to hide sensitive data from appearing on the lock screen.
iPhone 14 Pro always-on feature could be more exciting than Android’s implementation
Here’s how the iPhone 14 Pro’s always-on display will work…
Rather than being completely black with just the date/time like on Android, your wallpaper will fade out and still be visible.
(via @9to5mac) pic.twitter.com/DfJV8CTxuR
— AppleTrack (@appltrack) July 29, 2022
The native wallpapers now have a new state called “Sleep” which has dimmed elements. The outlet notes that wallpapers in the sleep state are similar to Apple Watch faces when always-on is enabled.
It appears that when users will turn off the iPhone 14 Pro screen, the sleep version will be enabled. 9to5Mac was successful in reproducing the behavior.
That means that the wallpaper will still be somewhat visible in the always-on mode and the screen will likely also show the clock and widgets and will return to full brightness when the phone is unlocked.
The regular models – the 6.1-inch iPhone 14 and 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Max – will allegedly have 60Hz screens, which rules out the possibility of always-on support.
