Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The iPad mini 6 launched this week to much fanfare, thanks to its radically modern redesign and latest-generation A15 processor.

However, as customers receive their new iPads, a prominent issue is being spotted again and again. Colloquially referred to as ‘jelly scrolling’, it seems that one side of the iPad mini display is refreshing slower than the other side, which appears as a noticeable wobble effect down the middle of the screen when content is moving quickly — like scrolling a web page.

Here’s video showing what this looks like in slo-mo:

https://twitter.com/backlon/status/1440678843589689346

I see this on my iPad mini, though I didn’t notice it until I started reading about it. Of course, now I can’t not see it.

This doesn’t bother me, particularly, but I do hate to see this fly in the ointment of a terrific product launch. Since this issue involves the way video refresh is done, not clear if this is simply a software fix, like the Unlock with Apple Watch issue appears to be.

Here’s hoping.

Apple:

With the release of iOS 15, Apple Maps gets its biggest update ever with a city experience that offers rich details, driving routes with better navigation, immersive walking directions shown in augmented reality, and much more. The update, which expands on the new map that Apple spent years building from the ground up, is now available in London, Los Angeles, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area, with more cities to come.

And:

Apple Maps introduces a new way to navigate cities with a visually stunning 3D map that offers unprecedented detail for neighborhoods, commercial districts, marinas, buildings, and more. Now users can see elevation details across a city, new road labels, and hundreds of custom-designed landmarks like Coit Tower in San Francisco, Dodger Stadium in LA, the Statue of Liberty in NYC, and the Royal Albert Hall in London, with more to come. A beautiful nighttime mode with a moonlit glow activates at dusk.

And:

Later this year, it will be available in Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. Support for additional cities, including Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, will be available next year.

Follow the headline link, scroll through the images to get a sense of what this looks like (at least to folks who can access it).

With every new Apple rollout, there are issues that crop up. Sometimes, it’s an unfixable hardware issue (thinking butterfly keyboard failure here). Other times, it’s a bug, fixed by a subsequent system release.

From the headline-linked Apple support note:

Apple has identified an issue where Unlock with Apple Watch may not work with iPhone 13 devices. You might see “Unable to Communicate with Apple Watch” if you try to unlock your iPhone while wearing a face mask, or you might not be able to set up Unlock with Apple Watch.

Yup. I’m experiencing this issue. I see the “Unable to Communicate with Apple Watch” alert when I try to turn the feature on.

Fortunately, Apple follows this with:

This issue will be fixed in an upcoming software update.

Hoping the iPad mini jelly scrolling issue (I’ll get to that in a couple of posts) is just as fixable.

Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch, got the chance to speak with Apple VP Kaiann Drance and Human Interface Team designer Johnnie Manzari about Cinematic Mode.

“We knew that bringing a high-quality depth of field to video would be magnitudes more challenging [than Portrait Mode],” says Drance. “Unlike photos, video is designed to move as the person filming, including hand shake. And that meant we would need even higher-quality depth data so Cinematic Mode could work across subjects, people, pets and objects, and we needed that depth data continuously to keep up with every frame. Rendering these autofocus changes in real time is a heavy computational workload.”

And:

“We didn’t have an idea [for Cinematic Mode]. We were just curious — what is it about filmmaking that’s been timeless? And that kind of leads down this interesting road and then we started to learn more and talk more … with people across the company that can help us solve these problems.”

That second quote offers an interesting insight into how features like this are born. Sometimes new features are the result of trying to solve a specific problem in a clever way. Cinematic Mode was more born from an exploration into an existing process, trying to bring an existing solution from the complex, expensive, hardware heavy filmmaking world to the iPhone.

Nice writeup by Panzarino. Don’t miss the section “Testing Cinematic Mode” with the embedded demo reel. Don’t just watch the demo reel. It needs the context of Matthew’s descriptions to give a true sense of what Cinematic Mode is and isn’t. Great read.