Apple admits screen problems in ‘the most expensive’ iPhone X

CALIFORNIA: As Apple’s newly-launched iPhone X continues to fetch profits for the company, buyers of the expensive handset, on the other hand, are encountering a problem they shouldn’t have expected.

Apple’s iPhone X went on sale last Friday with queues at Apple Stores around the world as fans hoped to get their hands on the tenth-anniversary handset.

Apple has admitted that there are issues with the screen on the iPhone X in a suitably downplayed support document called ‘About the Super Retina display on your iPhone X’.

They say:

“If you look at an OLED display off-angle, you might notice slight shifts in color and hue.

This is a characteristic of OLED and is normal behavior. With extended long-term use, OLED displays can also show slight visual changes…

This is also expected behavior and can include ‘image persistence’ or ‘burn-in,’ where the display shows a faint remnant of an image even after a new image appears on the screen.”

These issues are similar to those being experienced by owners of Google’s Pixel 2 XL smartphone, although the Pixel 2 XL has the additional problem of poor colour calibration on the screen.

Read: iPhone X sales: Apple nears trillion-dollar in market cap

While this can be tweaked through software (and I would expect an over-the-air update to take care of that in the next few weeks), the physical properties of the Pixel’s OLED screen cannot be altered so easily.

Apple now faces a similar issue. Although it has calibrated the screen (and the TrueTone technology constantly shifts the balance depending on ambient light conditions) the display suffers from the loss of accurate colours when looking from the side and the potential for bright images to be burned into the screen.

VIDEO: The screen problem in iPhone X