iPad mini iPad Mini 6 jelly scrolling

[Mac Tyson]

Thank you for coming around to it. But your "scrolling while reading" comments had me intrigued. I was going to reply about it last night but was too tired.

Now, I always assumed everyone does some reading while scrolling. Then I asked my dad and apparently he doesn't at all (says it increases eye strain)! I don't typically "read to absorb" while scrolling, but I definitely "read to scan" while scrolling. I'm always picking out keywords when choosing whether to click on a reddit or forum post. After that, I stop and have a more careful read if I need to. It's an essential part of the normal social media and website experience.

Even aside from that, I often read fast enough that I end up doing a slow scroll through the web page/app to keep the text in the middle. I can see the effect even going at the slowest possible scroll speed... The only times I don't see it is when flipping pages on kindle/books or using it in landscape mode or watching videos/gaming.

Correct. I guess most misunderstood when I said scrolling and reading. Yes, just like you, I skim the page, scan words when scrolling. I pick out keywords during the scroll to process. If it interests me, I stop at that section to read.

I was genuinely interested in the process of how others 'read' while scrolling. When I scroll on this ipad (let's have in landscape mode just to minimize jelly scroll affect) it's still hard to read a whole sentence (not scan the sentence).

Anyway, I'm currently still enjoying this Ipad but coming from a 2017 ipad pro 10.5, i do notice the lack of promotion more now. I've been used to my ipad pro for so long....

 

[BorisDG]

Exactly what I said earlier.

 

[tpfang56]

Correct. I guess most misunderstood when I said scrolling and reading. Yes, just like you, I skim the page, scan words when scrolling. I pick out keywords during the scroll to process. If it interests me, I stop at that section to read.

I was genuinely interested in the process of how others 'read' while scrolling. When I scroll on this ipad (let's have in landscape mode just to minimize jelly scroll affect) it's still hard to read a whole sentence (not scan the sentence).

Anyway, I'm currently still enjoying this Ipad but coming from a 2017 ipad pro 10.5, i do notice the lack of promotion more now. I've been used to my ipad pro for so long....

In that case it must come down to eye sensitivity. Unfortunately I’m more sensitive to it, and I really wish I wasn’t so I could just enjoy my first new ipad in 5+ years. I wonder if I could train myself to see to not look for it, but that seems unlikely atm.

If the effect was a tad more subtle, I bet I could get used to it.

 

[sracer]

Interesting -

Thanks for that. I highly respect Teoh and have seen over the years that he's a straight-up guy who tries to tell it like it is without drama.

All of the jelly scroll videos I've seen include either a lot of graphics or web pages. Any videos exhibiting this issue with text documents?

 

[Jayson A]

Every screen has jelly scroll, but since the refresh goes from left to right in portrait mode and the narrow screen makes it stand out really easy.

My iPhone mini does it (horizontal mode)
My iPad mini 4 does it (horizontal mode)
My desktop monitor does it (horizontally)

All screens show this same exact effect. The only way they could possibly fix it is by doing a reverse jelly animation to even out the effect. That would be interesting to see. I could see Apple doing this and bragging about how no other display has ever had this type of motion accuracy before hah.

 

[Dominican]

Since Apple confirmed this is normal who's going to return their iPads

 

[Attirex]

Very interesting, ie, iFixit report and controller location. My Mini 6 exhibits jelly-ing in portrait, none in landscape. Tried fast scrolling on my wife's very ancient full-sized iPad (whatever model/year it is, no idea), and no jelly-ing in portrait, but in landscape you can see a slight bit of jelly-ing on the far right side.

Soooooo I guess that's exciting information for......someone.

 

[ExxonVS]

Since Apple confirmed this is normal who's going to return their iPads

Done that today. It has been picked up by the carrier this afternoon. I’m kinda sad about it, cause I loved the form factor, I have folio case, bag for this Mini, but it was sickening to see the jelly scrolling And my main use case is portrait mode… so, I cannot avoid being affected by the issue.

 

[BorisDG]

The only way Apple to fix this is to change the display and specially how is controlled. They have to make it exactly like the Air 4 than problem solved. So all current Mini have to be recalled.

 

[klasma]

The problem for Apple now is this: somewhere along the process of this redesign, someone decided to prioritize landscape mode (for reasons that baffle me).

Someone somewhere then failed communicate this to Marketing or Retail, because:
- When you visit Apple’s splash page for the Mini the first thing you see is the new Mini shown in… portrait.
- When you go to buy the product from anywhere (Amazon, Apple,etc) the device is shown in…portrait.
- When iJustine (Youtuber) interviewed Tim Cook the other day he showed her the new Mini and was holding it in… portrait .
- If you go into a retail store the new Minis are all laid out in…portrait.

View attachment 1851651

It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't a conscious decision at all about prioritizing landscape. It might simply have been the result of what was more expedient from a manufacturing standpoint.

 

[azentropy]

Saw it in person for myself today. It was more prominent than I thought. Went back home to see if I could reproduce it both in landscape and portrait on my other iPads ranging from an old mini 2, original Air, a couple of Air 2s, 2018 11 Pro, Air 4 and a regular 2018 iPad and none of them exhibits anything close to what I saw on the iPad mini 6 at the Apple Store.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Saw it in person for myself today. It was more prominent than I thought. Went back home to see if I could reproduce it both in landscape and portrait on my other iPads ranging from an old mini 2, original Air, a couple of Air 2s, 2018 11 Pro, Air 4 and a regular 2018 iPad and none of them exhibits anything close to what I saw on the iPad mini 6 at the Apple Store.

Yup -- It really does need to be seen in person.

I was also surprised and found it instantly noticeable, very distracting and worse than what I'm seeing in online videos.

 

[imdog]

Biggest piece of junk Apple has ever released

 

[BorisDG]

Biggest piece of junk Apple has ever released

In general this years products are disappointing. A15 is nothing more than shrink of A14 with very laughable performance advantage over it's predecessor. With the current chip shortages they even had to make 3 different tiers of the A15.

In this review the NAND memory in Mini 6 is 2x slower than Air 4 for example (10:03):

Also the camera quality on both front/back looks sharper on the Air 4 in this video. Mic also sounds nicer.

 

[turbineseaplane]

In this review the NAND memory in Mini 6 is 2x slower than Air 4 for example (10:03):

Sheesh -- and that's not even against an iPad Pro, so we can't use the excuse of "but the iPad mini isn't a Pro spec machine!"

 

[BorisDG]

Will be still good someone else to make the same test just for information.

 

[Karnicopia]

Really bummed because it is an otherwise great device but this is bugging me and yeah it’s one of those things that I didn’t really see at first but now that I do it’s pretty bad on the mini compared to anything I’m comparing it to and that is the primary orientation I use my device and I see it scrolling pictures, text, media so it really does impact just about everything I use this for.

Kind of staggering to me that someone made this design decision that they would just prioritize landscape scrolling when it was fine before and when I’m consuming media in landscape or playing games I’m not usually scrolling. Just one of those things where you wonder if they were trying to be too clever or if they were maybe too lazy and just went with the same layout of the Air without thinking of the different usage of the devices. Not sure but this definitely compromises my main usage of the mini which is a shame because I really do love it but this may be a dealbreaker for me. We’ll see though I still have some time so may as well use it.

 

[bearington]

I've returned my mini 6 and ordered an iPhone 13 Pro Max to use as a mini iPad mini. If Apple somehow fixes the jelly scroll, I'll re-buy the mini 6 in a few months but if not, the Pro Max will do until mini 7.

 

[BorisDG]

I've returned my mini 6 and ordered an iPhone 13 Pro Max to use as a mini iPad mini. If Apple somehow fixes the jelly scroll, I'll re-buy the mini 6 in a few months but if not, the Pro Max will do until mini 7.

The only way that it can be fixed is that they change how the display is manufactured aka move the control on the bottom rather side.

 

[wilberforce]

The only way that it can be fixed is that they change how the display is manufactured aka move the control on the bottom rather side.

Yes, realistically it is likely to be 3 years until the Mini 7, which may well have mini-led or oled or 120Hz display by then.
So I am keeping my Mini 6, and will just get another one when it is updated. Not going to wait years.

 

[BurgDog]

They could probably fix it in software by taking snapshots of the page every 17ms and only displaying those static snapshots. That, of course, would lead to jerky scrolling instead of smooth scrolling so people wouldn't like that either. That would work best on 120hz displays.

Apple tried to make the landscape scrolling perfect and screwed up the portrait scrolling in the process. If they had continued to make portrait scrolling perfect as before, landscape scrolling would be defective but still much less annoying to those who notice these things. Engineering is all about making choices between least bad options like that, they chose poorly based on use cases.

I'm still waiting for mine to arrive. I expect I won't notice as my vision is declining due to age and my field of vision likely won't see the complete line all at once like I used to be able to do. I have to scan while I read even on narrow displays. Also I plan on mostly using landscape mode so I can expand the text sizes more to see better. Still won't know until I have one to try. I am expecting an improvement over my 13ProMax which does work fairly well for me now in landscape.

 

[imdog]

They could probably fix it in software by taking snapshots of the page every 17ms and only displaying those static snapshots. That, of course, would lead to jerky scrolling instead of smooth scrolling so people wouldn't like that either. That would work best on 120hz displays.

Apple tried to make the landscape scrolling perfect and screwed up the portrait scrolling in the process. If they had continued to make portrait scrolling perfect as before, landscape scrolling would be defective but still much less annoying to those who notice these things.

I'm still waiting for mine to arrive. I expect I won't notice as my vision is declining due to age and my field of vision likely won't see the complete line all at once like I used to be able to do. I have to scan while I read even on narrow displays. Still won't know until I have one to try.

That’s part of why it’s so much worse to have jelly scrolling in portrait

 

[dcpmark]

They could probably fix it in software by taking snapshots of the page every 17ms and only displaying those static snapshots. That, of course, would lead to jerky scrolling instead of smooth scrolling so people wouldn't like that either. That would work best on 120hz displays.

Apple tried to make the landscape scrolling perfect and screwed up the portrait scrolling in the process. If they had continued to make portrait scrolling perfect as before, landscape scrolling would be defective but still much less annoying to those who notice these things. Engineering is all about making choices between least bad options like that, they chose poorly based on use cases.

I'm still waiting for mine to arrive. I expect I won't notice as my vision is declining due to age and my field of vision likely won't see the complete line all at once like I used to be able to do. I have to scan while I read even on narrow displays. Still won't know until I have one to try.

For 9 years I’ve used landscape viewing 98% of the time on my Minis, and I’ve never noticed jelly on any of them. The only time I use portrait is when a game or app forces me to. But the change on the Mini 6 must suck for the portrait users affected by the jelly because I don’t recall any landscape users complaining about jelly on the Mini 5 or any previous Minis.

I can’t stand portrait view because it’s just a big phone screen designed to use mobile browsers, which blow when compared to desktop browsers, IMHO. In using landscape I have always treated my Mini as a desktop replacement with a desktop browser. But maybe since there was no uproar by us landscape users in previous models Apple will change it back?

 

[turbineseaplane]

But the change on the Mini 6 must suck for the portrait users affected by the jelly because I don’t recall any landscape users complaining about jelly on the Mini 5 or any previous Minis.

So much this ^^
Nobody was saying a word about this (effectively) in landscape before

 

[dcpmark]

Biggest piece of junk Apple has ever released

You must be newish to Apple products……you should have been around in the 90s. 😆