An unknown number of iPhone 15 Pro Max owners are finding the image of home screen apps being burnt-in to the display, but the issue doesn't appear to be any worse than any other year.
I used to work for a tiny company that made garbage android tablets, and we saw this issue on a subset of our devices. Really quick burn in after just a couple of hours. IIRC ours was from defective hardware due to its cheap nature. I wrote a test suite to for tablet where one test required the device to site with the screen on for a few hours and then changed to a grey screen that made it easy to identify burn-in, and the manufacturer had to say yes or no if it had it. I think our problem pretty much went away after that.
Though this could be a different issue. It could be a driver issue.
My understanding is that a lot of “burn in” with OLED screens isn’t permanent. The quote accurately calls it “image retention” because the image is temporarily retained but the screen will go back to normal. It also points out that this type of thing happens under niche circumstances. Almost like people are trying to make this happen.
It's the other way around. OLED suffer from image retention due to the individual pixels being worn out. The only way to fix this is to wear out the rest of the panel to match (this is how the TVs keep things looking good).
Nope you’re thinking of actual burn in. With image retention the individual pixels are not permanently worn out. There are other factors in the panel cause the pixels to temporarily be unable to display their full color range. Often times if you turn the panel off for a few minutes and back on the image retention will be gone despite no calibration being done. If your panel experienced significant wear on the individual pixels after a few hours of being on like that then it would look terrible after a few years. The actual permanent pixel degradation is much more subtle.
Edit:
Here’s a source that describes this behavior for those of you who don’t believe me. I’m almost certain that I’m right here but would love to see some evidence otherwise.
Yes, it is but this isn’t it. I guarantee these displays are not permanently damaged so soon after launch. It usually takes thousands of hours of displaying the same image with max brightness to actually burn in a modern OLED panel.