Apple this month released a refreshed iPad mini, but new isn’t always better in every respect. In this case, a strange display behavior, colloquially known as “jelly scrolling,” has cropped up on the new iPad mini display, 9to5Mac reports.
With jelly scrolling, the iPad mini’s display seems to refresh each half separately rather than refreshing the entire screen in sequence. While it may not be noticeable in all situations, such as video or static imagery, the effect can be seen more readily while scrolling websites or pages of text, which sees one side shift slightly, then the other side, and so on. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn documented the effect in slow-motion on Twitter.
In the new iPad mini, Apple updated the display to its Liquid Retina LCD panel, increasing the resolution from 2,048‑by‑1,536 pixels to 2,266-by-1,488 pixels and the size from 7.9 to 8.3 inches, though this still results in the same 326ppi density as the 2019 iPad mini. The “jelly scrolling” effect hasn’t been widely reported on for other devices running Liquid Retina displays, so it may be limited to just the 2021 iPad mini.
Hard to See Yet Hard to Un-See
Jelly scrolling is a subtle effect. It may be a defect, but it’s not exactly one that will make a device unusable for most people. Many may not even notice it, just as some manage to overlook the display notch at the top of recent iPhones. It also appears the effect is more prominent while using the iPad mini in a portrait orientation and less so in landscape, 9to5Mac suggests.
The effect is also more likely to show up while scrolling quickly, so users who more leisurely scroll through websites and documents may not run into it. That said, it’s the kind of effect that can be hard to un-see, and some people may find it distracting.
Apple may have avoided this by using a high-refresh-rate display like that on the iPad Pro and now the iPhone 13 Pro. But at $500, the fact is that the iPad mini is still on the affordable side compared to the $1,000 iPhone 13 Pro and $800 iPad Pro.
