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Nessdufrat

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 19, 2015
164
36
Between France and Switzerland
Hi there,
This question is more about curiosity than about finding a solution for it, since it's not giving me troubles-yet.
I inherited a nice iPad mini 4 because of that screen issue. A friend of mine had this iPad mini for about a year and noticed a big red "line" (more like a bold finger smudge) on the screen. After about a month or so, his iPad didn't wake up one morning, and him being a very patient person, he plugged it in (probably had only the iPhone adapter), didn't see anything happening, and decided to go and buy himself a new one. He was set on throwing the iPad away and I convinced him to give it to me so that I could try to at least see what was wrong with it. Turns out, it was simply completly out of battery. I tried to give it back but he didn't want it. Anyway, I now have a very cool iPad mini 4, but it does have this weird screen issue, which doesn't affect function at all. I've had it for two months now and I use it everyday or so, not a lot since my main gear is my iPad Pro, but still, I spend at least half an hour on it each day.

I tried to find an explanation to this weird screen behavior, but was unable to find anything similar on the internet. The smudge doesn't move, I have the impression it expanded when I tried putting a bit of pressure on it (silly me) but I'm not even sure. It's hard to say. I tried a suction cup and pulling the screen gently in the area of the smudge, it didn't do anything.

Like I said, my question is nowhere vital, but I'm just curious as to why such a smudge would appear. Did my friend put too much pressure on it at what point? Was it a defect when the screen was manufactured? Is it reacting so because the components underneath are running too hot?

I found tons of things about the infamous red lines, but that not it at all. I included a picture. That's the iPad displaying a black image, and then, displaying the normal screen. The color is a bit over saturated, in reality it's nowhere as annoying as that.

Any explanation would be greatly appreciated. Again, I'm not trying to fix it (like, I'm not looking to change the screen or anything), I'm just wondering where that's coming from. I could go to a Genius Bar but my experience with them has been disastrous so far. Besides, that would mean waiting for hours for a guy taking one look at my iPad and quoting me $200 to change the screen and not being able to give me a single explanation on why that's happening.

Thanks a lot :)

Red smudge on the black background :
image.jpeg

Red smudge quite visible on the app screen. In "normal" use, like for browsing, it's barely noticeable. And yeah, it's actually a double smudge, one horizontal one, and one that's going across the screen, my reason for thinking that it might have been pressure related.

image.jpeg
 
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