As Apple’s new iPad mini (2021) has begun to reach customers’ hands, it is encountering some concern as certain users report a strange refresh rate issue with their display.
The problem is only noticeable when the tablet is in portrait mode with the camera on top of the device and on text-heavy web pages. If you’ve aligned these variables and are scrolling quickly, you’ll notice that one side of the screen updates faster than the other, making the text appear to be skewed as you navigate through a page.
This has been notably captured by Dieter Bohn of The edge On twitter. While your example makes the problem look pretty bad, I didn’t realize this in my time with an iPad mini. However, I will say that I use the tablet mainly in landscape mode. I will also mention that while I found it particularly remarkable when visiting The edge and Polygon, I’m not entirely sure it’s happening everywhere. For instance, CBC and MobileSyrup both did not appear to be affected by the gelatin shift error.
Here’s a slow motion video of scrolling on the iPad Min. I slowed EVEN MORE by one step frame by frame. Notice how the right goes up faster than the left.
In normal use, it is barely visible, but occasionally it shows. In the landscape it disappears completely pic.twitter.com/iq9LGJzsDI
– Dieter Bohn (@backlon) September 22, 2021
Still, this is a strange problem, and a reader who contacted 9to5Mac He even said that when they went to return their mini because they thought it was faulty, they noticed that all the displays suffered from the same problem. This suggests that all new Minis are likely to suffer from the same problem.
What I find most interesting is that people are noticing this more than the slim-feeling front glass panel. I noticed in my review that when you push the screen too hard, you see a considerable amount of distortion on the LCD screen. Even if you are using the Apple Pencil in apps that support pressure sensitivity, I think that to reach maximum pressure, you have to press hard enough on the screen to distort it.
It is not clear if the update frequency issue can be fixed by a software update or if it is a hardware issue.