The iPad mini has finally gotten an update to match Apple’s latest iPad and iPhone design.
Its new 8.3” display is surrounded by these now-familiar flat aluminum
edges coated in this very nice purple color.
iPads are typically about as awful as it gets when it comes to repair,
but that doesn’t mean we can resist taking this cute little thing apart. I’m always hopeful
that the iPad design team will start taking notes from the iPhone team, maybe this will be the one.
A few minutes on a heat pad softens the adhesive holding that new display on,
and then a little suction helps me get a pick under and start slicing. This is the first bad
part of iPad repairs—as you make your way around the display to cut the adhesive, you have to
be extremely careful not to put your pick in too far, or else you can damage the display.
Once all the adhesive is cut, I can remove the Phillips screws covering
the two display connectors, and hey! There’s a battery connector here too! I can’t even
remember the last time we’ve seen an easily accessible battery connector on an iPad.
A quick sidebar on that display, now that it’s free: a few people have noticed that
this iPad mini has a bit of “jelly scrolling”, where one half of the screen refreshes faster
than the other. This is also called “scan-out skewing.” you can test for it on Blur Busters,
which we’ll link below. Jelly scrolling isn’t uncommon in LCD and OLED displays,
but it’s usually less noticeable than this—I’ll explain why in a sec.
At first we actually couldn’t see it on our iPad minis and thought it was a screen
lottery situation, but after some comparison and messing with camera settings, we finally got it.
Here’s the new iPad mini scrolling through some text in slow-motion.
You’ll notice as the display refreshes, one side of the display sort of lags behind the other.
Here’s the iPad Air that was released earlier this year: you won’t notice
the same jelly in portrait orientation, but in landscape it’s definitely there.
For a super deep dive into this phenomenon and the tech behind it, you can read this blur busters
post, which has some great ultra-slow-motion shots of different displays and the way they refresh.
The short version is this: the jelly you see while the iPad mini scrolls
does have to do with the way the screen refreshes.
Basically it can’t happen all at once, the pixels change in a line across the screen,
more like a wave, or a “scan”. My hypothesis is that the direction of that scan is related to the
placement of the controller board that drives the display —you can see here on the backside
of our iPad displays that the mini’s board is oriented vertically, and the Air’s is horizontal.
When you scroll parallel to the direction the display is refreshing,
the display still isn’t refreshing all at once,
but the effect of the refresh is much less noticeable because it’s not splitting the text.
This is why you probably don’t notice this on other displays—the
jelly scroll is usually masked because the display is refreshing (or scanning) parallel to whichever
way the scrolling motion is taking place. So a computer monitor will refresh vertically in
its landscape orientation, and a smartphone will refresh vertically in its portrait orientation.
It just so happens that this iPad mini display is refreshing horizontally when
you hold it in its vertical orientation, which ... is the way you typically hold
an iPad to scroll. It’s also possible Apple is using a cheaper display panel,
so the refresh scan is more pronounced than they expected it to be.
Just for fun, we also checked an iPad Pro, whose display controller board is also vertical like
the mini’s. Its higher refresh rate screen does a much better job of hiding the jelly scroll,
but you can still see it when you slow down the footage.
Removing the battery Okay, sidebar over. back to the iPad
mini. Inside, this thing is unsurprisingly similar to the iPad Air. Except for … hold up: is that
stretch release adhesive under the battery? These sure look like pull tabs. Let’s give them a tug.
Well, that was a surprise. The sad part is, those tabs were slightly misleading,
the battery is still firmly glued down at the top and the bottom. Some isopropyl alcohol unsticks
the rest of it without too much trouble, but it can’t take away our disappointment.
It seems like the intent here was for the battery to be easily replaceable,
but somewhere along the line, the design team had to add some tougher adhesive
along the bottom edge of the battery, and some copper tape along the top.
Moving on, let’s crack open these new stereo speakers. The first one is easy enough to access,
just some light adhesive. But unfortunately the magnet inside has its own adhesive,
so … this speaker is probably done speaking.
The other speaker is sort of tied up in a bunch of other stuff up here, so I’ve got to do some,
cable disconnecting, and unscrewing. It … also comes away without the magnet.
Now it’s time to investigate this mystery corner over here. This seems like it could be
a third speaker, but that doesn’t seem likely.. Underneath the cover: a sorting tray!! Sweet!
I’ll just keep these screws here then. And who says Apple doesn’t care about iPad repair.
This is probably where the fancy new 5G hardware would go if we had sprung for the cellular model
Next, let’s peek at the new cameras in this thing for all
you iPad photographers out there. The front-facing camera is now a 12
megapixel ultra-wide with support for Apple’s center stage feature,
and in the camera bump on the back is another 12 megapixel sensor with a standard-wide f1.8 lens.
Finally, let’s at least uncover the a15 bionic processor driving this mini tablet. Peel up
this sticker and a metal shield, and sure enough! Here’s Apple’s latest and greatest system-on-chip.
Well, almost the greatest. Geekbench results have revealed that while this chip does have
the more powerful five-core GPU that the iPhone 13 Pro has, the CPU isn’t clocked as high. I’m
guessing these mini A15s are “binned”, which just means these are the chips that didn’t quite meet
the flagship iPhone standards. This A15 is still a huge step up from the old iPad mini though, and
you probably wouldn’t even notice the difference if you put this next to an iPhone 13 pro.
Oh, one more thing: the new USB-C port is modular!
That’s a small victory compared to the awkward soldered cable most other iPads have.
And that’s it for this iPad teardown! Finding adhesive pull tabs under an iPad battery really
made me think that Apple had finally considered that replacement procedure,
but that was a lie. The modular USB-C port is nice but without any other major repairability changes,
that alone isn’t enough to move the needle in a
major way. This iPad earns a 3 out of 10 on our repairability scale.
I can say that I’d definitely rather repair this thing than any iPad Pro, or even the iPad Air,
but honestly that’s not saying much. Really it’s just the easy-to-disconnect battery
and the battery pull tabs, and neither of those are even put to good use here.
Thanks for watching! If you were hoping to see us tackle the power button touch-ID sensor,
go back and watch our iPad Air teardown, where we took that whole assembly out.