The impending refresh has long been teased, but last week the iPad mini 7 will become the third Apple-branded tablet to launch in 2024, with a modest announcement outlining some small but welcome hardware improvements. An announcement was made.
But for all the upgraded storage, the boost to Wi-Fi 6E and the jump to the (slightly downgraded) A17 Pro chipset are welcome. There’s one improvement that Apple doesn’t explicitly mention, and it could be part of the hardware.
In the latest edition of the Six Colors podcast, co-host Jason Snell said that, as previously predicted, the iPad mini 7 now features the “jelly-like scrolling” that frustrated owners of the previous model when holding the tablet in portrait mode. revealed that the problem had finally been addressed.
In the piece, first picked up by MacRumors, Snell clarifies his understanding that unspecified changes have been made to the iPad mini’s display hardware, with “implications” that the changes will fix jelly scrolling. I did. “I don’t think so,” he said. “And maybe it’ll get better. And maybe it’ll go away.”
For the uninitiated, jelly scrolling is when one half of the screen updates at a visibly different rate than the other, creating a slightly unpleasant wobble effect while it’s working (like scrolling down a web page). case, etc.).
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It’s hard to explain this effect, but this video from Vincent Teoh shows what’s happening in super slow motion and why some people find scrolling on an iPad mini 6 an unpleasant experience. is explained.
One theory as to why it’s especially noticeable on the iPad mini 6 was revealed in an iFixIt teardown video. The controller board responsible for the display is mounted vertically instead of horizontally in previous generations, and the way the screen updates (from left to right instead of top to bottom) appears to have changed.
This means that if you’re browsing the web in landscape mode, scrolling and refreshing in parallel, you won’t notice any jelly-like scrolling, but most people hold their iPad mini when reading web content. Not this way.
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We won’t know how effectively this issue was resolved until the tablets are in the hands of early adopters next week, but it would be surprising if Apple didn’t try to minimize the issue in some way. It’s the right thing to do. controller board. Apple would point out that jelly scrolling is normal behavior for LCD displays, but that didn’t prevent talk of a class action lawsuit specifically targeting the iPad mini 6.
That said, as Teoh explains, one way for Apple to make jelly scrolling less of an issue would be to upgrade the mini to a ProMotion 120Hz display, but the company isn’t going to do this this time around. We’re screwed. As the iFixIt video shows, jelly scrolling is also present on iPad Pros with vertically mounted control boards, but the refresh rate is so high that it’s invisible unless viewed in slow motion.
We’ll have a full review of the iPad mini 7 soon, but in the meantime, here are five reasons why computing writer Tony Polanco is excited for the iPad mini 7.
