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iFixit iPad Mini 7 Teardown Fails to Shed Much Light on Apple’s ‘Jelly Scrolling’ Fix

Apple last week released the iPad mini 7 and well-known electronics repair website iFixit has performed that teardown voodoo that they do, so well, and over the weekend shared an iPad mini 7 teardown video, which fails to shed much light to the device’s “jelly scrolling” improvements.

“Jelly scrolling” refers to an issue where users see screen tearing when scrolling through content while using the device in the portrait orientation.

Since the release of the sixth-generation iPad mini back in September 2021, some users report noticing that their iPad mini’s text was appearing slightly uneven while scrolling in portrait orientation on the device. The text on the left side of the screen appears to slightly lag behind the text on the right side while scrolling. While some users were not bothered by the issue, some said that once noticed, the issue was hard to ignore, making it irritating to look at while possibly causing eye strain.

While an Apple spokesperson once claimed that “jelly scrolling was “normal” behavior for iPads with LCD displays, it appears Apple did decide to reduce the “normal” effect on the recently-released iPad mini 7. Several reviewers have commented that “jelly scrolling” was less noticeable or not noticeable at all on the new iPad mini. Apple has made a vague statement to some reviewers that it made display-related changes to address the matter.

While some had speculated that Apple might have rotated the display controller inside the iPad mini 7 to make “jelly scrolling” less visible in portrait orientation, iFixit found that the display controllers position had remained unchained from the sixth-generation iPad mini.

iFixit then concluded that Apple had performed some so far unknown “trickery” to reduce the “jelly scrolling” effect.

In the teardown video, it was also revealed that the iPad mini 7’s rear Apple logo can be removed. However, the device’s internal design is otherwise similar to its predecessor.

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.