iPad mini 7 could fix the tiny tablet’s biggest problem

If you’re an iPad mini 6 owner with an eye for detail, you’ve likely encountered the so-called ‘jelly scrolling’ problem.

Essentially, text and images look tilted as you scroll thanks to varying refresh rates, and while Apple has argued that this is just normal LCD screen behavior, it proved suitably annoying for some consumers to attempt a class action lawsuit over it.

Good news for potential mini buyers put off by the concept, the tipster Instant Digital has claimed that Apple has got the problem fixed in time for the iPad mini 7. Posting on the Chinese social network Weibo, the leaker claims that a change in the way the screen is assembled means that the “phenomenon” has “improved.”

Obviously that’s a machine translation, and machine translations can be imperfect, so we’ll have to wait and see exactly how noticeable jelly scrolling is on a future model. That’s if it’s improved at all — while Instant Digital’s predictions have proved accurate in the past, this remains just a rumor for now.

In the same short post, Instant Digital states that we can also expect improvements to the front camera but that “the details are not very clear.” For reference, the current model comes with a 12MP ultrawide selfie snapper.

In a separate post, the tipster states that the refreshed tablet could launch later this month alongside a USB-C version of the Apple Pencil, which makes sense given Apple’s sudden rush to erase the Lightning connector after years of defending it. It will also apparently come with the Apple A16 chipset, giving it similar performance to an iPhone 14 Pro or an iPhone 15 (the Pro models got the A17 Pro chip). The current version uses the A15 chip, sharing it with the iPhone 13.

Instant Digital claims these aren’t the only tablets Apple will be refreshing before the month is out, and the tipster reckons that we’ll see an 11th-generation iPad and the iPad Air 6 too. The leaker doesn’t go into any detail about those tablets, however, literally just mentioning the product names and nothing more.

But according to Mark Gurman, we shouldn’t expect any great shakes from them. The Bloomberg reporter, when revealing big changes for the 2024 iPad Pro, stated that he doesn’t think we’ll see “anything other than minor updates to the company’s other tablets before then”.

Such small changes likely won’t require a full Apple event, he believes. “There will be another launch in October,” Gurman told the MacRumors podcast last month. But at the time, he wasn’t sure it would be enough to “drag people down to Cupertino.” Instead, he suggests, we should expect something like the M2 Pro launch in January, where Apple unexpectedly dropped a 20-minute promotional video without warning.