iPad Pro screen unresponsive

I can confirm the issue has not come back.

I also think that people experiencing the touch issue to lesser degrees may not have realized that their ipad pro is performing 70% slower than it should. Having it forget the pencil brought back the super fast ipad pro i payed for and loved in January.

So the issue is not restricted to touch responsiveness but overall latency of the ipad pro. i'm talking things as basic as swiping from page one to page two on the home screen.

I would guess that there are sensor/cpu cycles spent looking for the pencil when they shouldn't be (i.e. the issue persisted even as the pencil sat unused in the cupboard for 4 months). Since people who never purchased the pencil have the issue there maybe more than one contributing factor.

Not yet 4 me in DE.

A last comment before 12.4 finally resolves the issue ... ;-)

I was thinking why the occurrence of the issue is so (comparatively) rare and random.

If at the HW level two chips share a common HW bus interface and due to timing inaccuracies there are bit collisions then

1. These problems are often caught e.g. by a parity bit and mitigated by a retry immediately.
2. Driver transistors will be under electrical stress and my degrade over time.

The occurrence of the issue my depend on fine tolerances.

At the SW level for security reasons most OSs nowadays use a (pseudo)randomized memory layout, seeded by some serial number or so. If something like a concurrency issue in low-level SW causes illegal memory accesses that would be caught by some memory protection exception usually. Any further behavior may depend on usage and is hard to predict (that‘s why this is a security feature).

The more Apple improves security the more they‘d mask such an error, making it harder for them to catch it.

Finally: If people @ Apple are smart (they are) they would carefully scan debug data that can be shared with them with the „iPad analysis“ setting. These data can even be looked at by us users.

Did anyone ever notice a correlation between the touchscreen issue and those logs?

It did not occur to me so far that I should have a look.

Michel, it's not "dominating". Everyone is free to post. The thread was idle for several days. so this is hardly intrusive and certainly not off topic.

The idea is not to stress test the ipad, rather these exaggerated use cases tend to give immediate reproducible results that may give a hint as to what causes the more subtle harder to reproduce day to day issue. who installs 150 apps at once? someone setting up a new ipad by loading the software they had installed on their old one. in this case i had previously uninstalled 800 apps when the issue first appeared. i am now installing them back. it's not that unusual.

This may give some hints, for example on installing the second batch of 140 apps, the ipad did not heat up and the issue did not occur, i assume because they did not include huge size games like the first app. so huge io operations increase temperature which is yet another way to reproduce the issue.

is it the most common way, i doubt it because as i said previously it would be very difficult to increase ipad temp through normal use. as for the ipad not being a gaming machine. I respectfully disagree so do the thousands of games on the store.

but that is not the point. rather this is a reproducible case. that is where its usefulness ends. I agree with you about the pencil being a much more common root cause.

Maybe you want to wait a few weeks for the next generation of iPads (rumors abound) - and maybe you‘d want avoid their infant diseases ...

It seems I could replicate my issue (11“, 12.4) a few times yesterday while using Vimeo (though no heating observed); will have to see if it becomes sufficiently deterministic.

Apple has still not (publicly) figured this out, but they have expanded their diagnostic protocol. Now, for instance, they are asking to always set up as new and to NOT retrieve anything from backup in terms of systems software or applications. That gives me hope that they are finally trying to figure this out. Unfortunately, I've done a clean install each time and have restored NOTHING from any of the backups, and now it appears, for the third time, it hasn't prevented the problem.

They are also recommending that we record the problem with our iPhone or something to show to the geniuses. There are a lot of videos already online showing the problem, but I've also always been able to reproduce it at the Apple store, so that's not so much of an issue for me. But it shows that they're paying attention now, I think.

In my case, the iPad works great for the first four months or so before it starts to act up. In about six months, the problem becomes severe enough to warrant a complaint. Shortly after that, I have gotten them replaced. I find the problem at its worst in the middle of the screen, but the middle is what gets touched the most. If it decides to go unresponsive for several seconds, it often doesn't matter where I touch the screen for those several seconds. The last one I had (replacement number two) did have a light leak problem; they didn't check the original device for that -- just swapped it out.

Anyway, probably nothing really useful in this comment, except that Apple has agreed to replace the thing three times now.

Hello!

I would disagree with you. I have this issue too, already for half a year or so - and I have decided to get vocal only now (when I read your post). I am an engineer from a 3rd world country (no youtuber, no blogger, no influencer, no journalist) - so I do not have any sort of auditory which can hear me.

I will share some of the symptoms which might be useful for analytics:

1) I have a couple of ipad 2018s, an ipad 5 mini 2019 and bunch of iphones in my home. None of those have this issue.

2) Sliding the finger is less affected, tapping is more affected

3) Areas which are affected most are left side and upper side + center (if we look at the ipad in vertical orientation). It becomes very hard to type text while the iPad is in horizontal orientation because the virtual keyboard is in the most affected area). In vertical it is more or less OK.

4) IMPORTANT: the issue becomes more visible while charging!

5) Hard reset temporarily fixes the issue.

6) iPadOS behaves better, but still has issues. Maybe iOS 13 utilises less resources which reduces heat etc.

Different iPad Pro models from different years have this issue and has no bearing on usage.

Some iPad Pro users here only doing light resource intense activities state their iPad Pro model has this issue.

I am convinced that this is mostly ( but not entirely ) iOS oftware related and in combination with some common third party software, of which, no one here is aware.

I recently stopped tracking user numbers affected because this is simply not happening to a large enough user base to be a common issue.

Have not upgraded to iPadOS, yet.

Mainly I am waiting out this week for the upgrade frenzy to die down and Apple server traffic to die down before I do the upgrade.

I just purchased the $40 Apple Lightning to USB 3.0 adapter, so I can start testing some of my external drives after I do the upgrade.

Yes.

The offical release of iOS 12.2 should fix this.

It was fixed in one of the iOS 12.2 public beta versions prior to the official release.

Have you tried a hard reset of your iPad after the update?

I’ve been running the beta and the issues, as far as I can see so far, have disappeared.

Some time ago you announced that you would finally try IPadOS13(.1.2). What are your results? I did not yet migrate, because my iPad 11“ behaves reasonably well since IOS22.4.

To all here.

Here is yet another angle and series of new questions.

Do any of you here have excessively dry skin/dry hands/fingers/fingertips?

Do any of you use any type of hand lotions/moisturisers?