A Faster ‘ProMotion’ Display

If there’s one single feature that we’d put money on for this year’s iPhone, it’s the move to newer and faster 120Hz LTPO display technology — at least when it comes to the iPhone Pro models.

After all, we heard more than one reliable report last year that this was supposed to come to the iPhone 12 Pro, from supply chain reports to actual leaked images of settings found in iOS 14. By all reports, the main reason that Apple had to quash these plans wasn’t even due to the lack of the displays themselves, but rather an inability to get enough driver chips to run the displays — a problem that it will have undoubtedly solved by this fall.

While this would be similar in principle to the “ProMotion” display technology that’s been a staple of all of Apple’s iPad Pro models since 2015, it wouldn’t be quite the same, since the iPad Pro 120Hz displays are entirely LCD-based, while the iPhone has moved exclusively to OLED. This is where the LTPO — short for low-temperature polycrystalline oxide — technology comes into play.

It’s unclear whether Apple will bring this to the entire iPhone lineup, but we’re betting that it will only be the Pro models, as it was allegedly going to be last year with the iPhone 12; 2020 actually marked the first time that all of Apple’s iPhones featured the same display technology, after the iPhone 12 moved from the LCD-based Liquid Retina found on its predecessors into the land of OLED, but we’re pretty confident that’s not what Apple originally intended.