LG was once a heavyweight in the smartphone industry, trading blows with hometown rival Samsung. However, as smartphone sales plateaued, the company struggled to stay competitive. In 2021, LG planned to make waves with a rollable phone, but it never moved beyond the teaser phase. Five years after LG threw in the towel on smartphones, the LG Rollable has appeared in a YouTube teardown that demonstrates why this form factor never took off.

The LG Rollable is just one of several rollable concept phones that appeared throughout the early 2020s. Flexible OLED screens had finally become affordable, leading to foldable phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold. Although, "affordable" is relative here. Foldables were and still are very expensive devices. Based on what we can see of the complex inner workings of the LG Rollable, these devices may have commanded even higher prices.

Noted YouTube phone destroyer JerryRigEverything managed to snag a working prototype LG Rollable. It may even be the unit LG demoed at CES 2021. The device looks like a regular phone at first glance, but a quick swipe activates the motor, which unfurls additional screen real estate from around the back. This makes the viewable area about 40 percent larger without the added thickness of a foldable.

The device expands with the aid of two tiny motors, which are attached via straight teeth to an internal track. The screen assembly has zipper-like teeth that keep it locked into the frame as it moves. The motors make a surprising amount of noise when operating, so LG designed the phone to play a musical chime to hide the sound.

While the motor does the heavy lifting, the phone also has a lattice of articulating spring-loaded arms inside that keep the OLED panel even as the frame slides side to side. The battery and motherboard sit in a tray that allows the back of the phone to expand as the OLED rolls into view.

This is a prototype phone, featuring a chunky frame and visible screws. That helped Zack Nelson from JerryRigEverything successfully disassemble and reassemble the phone. So this little bit of mobile history was not destroyed, and the teardown gives us a good look at how LG was hoping to attract new customers before calling it quits.

LG's last gasp

In 2020, LG's mobile division was searching for a way to stand out. The company tried hand gestures, rotating screens, phone cases with secondary screens, and rehashing old hardware with more stylish exteriors—none of it worked. Maybe the Rollable would have stood out if it launched in 2021 as planned, but looking at how it's built, it's hard to see how it could have been a successful product.

There's no doubt this piece of hardware is very cool. It's overengineered to an impressive degree, particularly for LG. That may sound like a dig, but it's not! This device demonstrates the kind of 2020 engineering chops we'd expect from the likes of Samsung. It doesn't look like something designed by a company that was mere months away from killing its smartphone division.

Okay, but there are problems with that kind of engineering. The complexity of the internals would have made the Rollable extremely expensive to manufacture, and it would have demanded a high price tag. Asking people to pay Galaxy Z money for an LG phone in 2021 was probably a non-starter.

Durability is also a big concern. There's just a lot going on inside this phone, with multiple motors, springy arms, tracks, and a screen that has to loop around the back. Even unpowered hinges on foldable phones add an additional point of failure, and they do fail sometimes. It took Samsung a few tries to design a hinge that wouldn't be defeated by dust, and a motorized phone would be even more vulnerable. It seems unlikely the LG Rollable could have survived daily use for multiple years.

As neat as this phone looks, no one ever pursued the form factor. LG wasn't alone in demoing rollables back then. Motorola, Oppo, and others showed off similar hardware at press events and trade shows, presenting the rollable as the next evolution of foldables. Still, no one has released a rollable even as foldables continue to chug along. Were they too fragile? Too expensive? Too loud? Maybe it was a mix of all of the above, based on what we've now seen of the LG Rollable. Manufacturing this phone at scale would have been a major undertaking, so it's not too surprising that LG just gave up rather than risk it.

Because LG never launched the Rollable, the Wing with its weird rotating screen went down in history as the company's final smartphone release.

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Some of you don’t just read the news. You monitor it. You’re tracking competitors, watching for security disclosures, following regulatory changes, or covering a beat where being 30 minutes late means you missed the story. NewsBlur has always been a great reader, but for people who need it to be a monitoring tool, I wanted to build something that takes feed fetching and filtering seriously.

Premium Pro is the new top tier. It includes everything in Premium Archive and adds two things that matter when speed is the priority: high-frequency fetching and a 10,000 site limit. And when you pair that with Premium Archive features like classifier-driven notifications, Pro becomes a real-time monitoring system.

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This is the headline feature. When you’re on Pro, every single feed in your account is checked every 5 minutes. This isn’t based on how often the feed publishes or how popular it is. It’s every feed, every time, regardless.

For context, most RSS readers check feeds every hour or two. Even NewsBlur’s Premium tier updates feeds up to 5x more often than standard, but Pro goes further. If a CVE drops, a competitor publishes a press release, or a regulatory filing appears, you’ll see it in minutes, not hours.

Notifications that actually keep up

Fast fetching only matters if you find out about new stories quickly. NewsBlur has a full notification system that pairs perfectly with Pro’s 5-minute polling. You can enable notifications per feed and choose whether to be notified about all unread stories or only Focus stories that match your intelligence training.

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Classifier-driven notifications, supercharged by Pro

Premium Archive recently added the ability to attach notifications directly to individual classifiers. Train a tag, author, title keyword, or phrase, and turn on notifications for that specific classifier. Track a specific author across a folder of feeds. Watch for a tag like “layoffs” or “acquisition” across your entire account. Get pinged the moment a story about a competitor shows up anywhere in your subscriptions. Classifier notifications work at every scope: per-feed, per-folder, or global across all your feeds.

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Follow up to 10,000 sites

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Editor’s note, April 6, 2026, 6 am ET: This story was originally published on March 29, 2018, and we’re revisiting it for this Easter.

Christians from a variety of traditions will celebrate Easter this Sunday. Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. For many Christians, including those from Eastern Orthodox traditions (who generally celebrate Easter later than Western Christians, as they use a different calendar), Easter is the most important Christian holiday of all.

But in North America and Europe, Easter has a diminished cultural force as a time for secular celebration — its wider cultural cachet hardly approaches that of Christmas. As Jesuit priest and writer James Martin wryly wrote for Slate, “Sending out hundreds of Easter cards this year? Attending way too many Easter parties? … Getting tired of those endless Easter-themed specials on television? I didn’t think so.”

So why don’t we celebrate Easter the way we do Christmas? The answer tells us as much about the religious and social history of America as it does about either holiday. It reveals the way America’s holiday “traditions” as we conceive of them now are a much more recent and politically loaded invention than one might expect.

The Puritans weren’t fans of either holiday

Christmas and Easter were roughly equal in cultural importance for much of Christian history. But the Puritans who made up the preponderance of America’s early settlers objected to holidays altogether. Echoing an attitude shared by the English Puritans, who had come to short-lived political power in the 17th century under Oliver Cromwell, they decried Christmas and Easter alike as times of foolishness, drunkenness, and revelry.

Cotton Mather, among the most notable New England preachers, lamented how “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty … by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!” As historian Stephen Nissenbaum wrote in The Battle for Christmas, “Christmas was a season of ‘misrule’ a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity.”

Like other feasting days (such as the pre-Lent holiday we now call Mardi Gras), Christmas was a dangerous time in which social codes could be violated and social hierarchies upended. (Among the practices Puritans objected to was the popularity of the “Lord of Misrule,” a commoner allowed to preside as “king” over the festivities in noble houses for the day.)

The very nature of having a holiday, furthermore, was seen as problematic. Rather, the Puritans argued, singling out any day for a “holiday” implied that celebrants thought of other days as less holy. 

Easter, too, was singled out as a dangerous time. A Scottish Presbyterian minister, Alexander Hislop, wrote a whole book about it: the 1853 pamphlet The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. Using questionable and vague sources, Hislop argued that the name of Easter derived from the pagan worship of the Germanic goddess Eostre, and through her the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. (This claim has persisted into the present day, and is often cited by those who want us to make Easter more fun and secular. Still, the evidence for the existence of Eostre in any mythological system — a single paragraph in the work of an English monk writing centuries later — let alone actual religious links between Eostre and Easter is scant at best.)

Hislop decried Easter as a pagan invention, writing: “That Christians should ever think of introducing the Pagan abstinence of Lent was a sign of evil; it showed how low they had sunk, and it was also a cause of evil; it inevitably led to deeper degradation.” Even seemingly harmless rituals — food, eggs — were signs of demonic evil: “The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now,” he wrote. Bad history it may have been, but it made good propaganda. 

What did the English Puritans, their American counterparts, and this Scottish Presbyterian have in common? As the title of Hislop’s pamphlet makes clear, they were all influenced by anti-Catholicism: a suspicion of rituals, rites, and liturgy they decried as worryingly pagan. The celebration of religious holidays was associated, for many of these preachers, with two suspicious groups of people: the poor (i.e., anyone whose holiday celebrations might be deemed dangerously licentious or uncontrolled) and “papists.” (Of course, in England and America alike, those two groups of people often overlapped.)

Christmas got reinvented, but Easter didn’t

So what changed? In the 19th century, Christmas, the secularized, domestic “family” holiday as we know it today, was reinvented. In his book, Nissenbaum goes into detail about the cultural creation of Christmas as a bourgeois, “civilized,” “traditional” holiday in the English-speaking world. Christmas, Nissenbaum argues, came to be identified with the preservation (and celebration) of childhood. Childhood itself was, of course, a relatively new concept, one linked to the rise of a growing, prosperous middle class in an increasingly industrialized society, in which child labor was (at least for the bourgeois) no longer a necessity.

Popular writers helped create a new, tamer, model of Christmas: Washington Irving’s 1822 Bracebridge Hall stories, which referenced “ancient” Christmas traditions that were, in fact, Irving’s own invention; Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “The Night Before Christmas”; and, of course, Charles Dickens’s 1843 A Christmas Carol. Nearly everything we think we know about Christmas, from the modern image of Santa Claus to the Christmas tree, derives from the 19th century, specifically, Protestant sources, who redeemed Christmas by rendering it an appropriate, bourgeois family holiday.

But no such redemption happened for Easter. While it, too, received a minor family-friendly makeover — Easter eggs, traditionally an act of charity for the poor, became a treat for children — it didn’t have the literary PR machine behind it that Christmas did.

Instead, its theological significance intact, Easter has maintained its status as a religious holiday and — the Easter Bunny and eggs aside — largely avoided any wider cultural proliferation. A study by historian Mark Connelly found that at the dawn of the 19th century, English books referred to the two more or less equally. By the 1860s, references to Easter were half that of Christmas, a trend that only continued. By 2000, Christmas was referenced almost four times as often as Easter. Today, Christmas is a federal holiday in the US, as is the nearest weekday after, should Christmas fall on a weekend. But “Easter Monday” gets no such treatment.

Christmas is a more natural fit for a secular holiday than Easter

The reason that Christmas, rather than Easter, became the “cultural Christian” holiday may well be prosaic. Religion News Service’s Tobin Grant suggests that the need for something frivolous to break up the monotony and cold weather rendered the Christmas season, rather than early spring, the ideal time for a period of celebration.

Or it may be theological. Christmas, with its celebration of the birth of a child, is a natural fit for a secularized celebration. Dogmatic Christians and casual semibelievers alike can agree that Jesus Christ, whether divine or not, was probably a person whose birth was worth celebrating. Plus, the subject matter makes it ideal for a child-centered holiday. The centrality of family in Christmas imagery — the Nativity scene, portraits of the madonna and child — allows it to “translate” easily into a holiday centered around children and childhood.

But the message of Easter, that of an adult man who was horribly killed, only to rise from the dead, is much harder to secularize. Celebrating Easter demands celebrating something so miraculous that it cannot be reduced, as Christmas can, to a heartwarming story about motherhood; its supernatural elements are on display front and center. It’s a story about death and resurrection.

But the same qualities that make Easter so difficult to secularize are also what make it so profound. As Matthew Gambino writes at CatholicPhilly.com,“That [paradox] is why I love Easter far more than Christmas. That moveable springtime feast celebrates not the beginning of the God-man’s life but the conquering of his suffering and ours. Easter marks the transcendence of death, the road leading beyond this life into eternity with the Father.”

Christmas as we know it today in the English-speaking world is, for better or worse, tied up in wider cultural ideas about family and a specifically Victorian, Protestant iteration of “middle-class values.” But the mystery of Easter remains strange, profound, and — for some — off-putting. But as the debate over the “meaning of Christmas” rages on, it’s nice to have one holiday, at least, where the meaning is clear.

The post Endgame appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.

This morning, Tesla published its production and delivery results for the first three months of 2026. And for the first time in a while, the news has been largely positive. The automaker built a total of 408,386 electric vehicles, a 12.6 percent increase from Q1 2025.

Almost all of those EVs were Models 3 and Y—the company built 394,611 of these, a 14.2 percent increase compared to the same quarter last year. The rest were mostly Cybertrucks, as we learned at the end of January that the aging Models S and X had finally been put out to pasture. At 14 years, the Model S's service to Tesla showed longevity beaten only by Nissan's R35 GT-R, which was old enough to vote when it was finally retired.

Overproduction

Tesla also recorded an increase in sales for Q1, though not to the same degree. It sold a total of 358,023 EVs, a 6.3 percent increase compared to the same quarter in 2025. Unfortunately for Tesla, that growth is only half as much as the increase in production.

Looking at the Models 3 and Y, we see the same trend. Tesla sold 341,893 of these vehicles, a 5.6 percent increase year over year. But it ended up with 50,000 more cars in inventory as well. Sales of everything else—the Cybertruck, Model S, and Model X—fell by 19.7 percent year over year to 13,775 units.

The bad news extends to Tesla's energy storage business. This has been growing steadily in recent years and contributes a small, if meaningful percentage to the company's coffers. But Tesla was able to deploy only 8.8 GWh of energy storage in Q1, a 15 percent decline compared to the same three months last year.

Both car deliveries and energy deployment were below analyst estimates.

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Ionizing radiation damage from electrons, protons and gamma rays will over time damage a CMOS circuit, through e.g. degrading the oxide layer and damaging the lattice structure. For a space-based camera that’s inside a probe orbiting a planet like Jupiter it’s thus a bit of a bummer if this will massively shorted useful observation time before the sensor has been fully degraded. A potential workaround here is by using thermal energy to anneal the damaged part of a CMOS imager.

The first step is to detect damaged pixels by performing a read-out while the sensor is not exposed to light. If a pixel still carries significant current it’s marked as damaged and a high current is passed through it to significantly raise its temperature. For the digital logic part of the circuit a similar approach is used, where the detection of logic errors is cause for a high voltage pulse that should also result in annealing of any damage.

During testing the chip was exposed to the same level of radiation to what it would experience during thirty days in orbit around Jupiter, which rendered the sensor basically unusable with a massive increase in leakage current. After four rounds of annealing the image was almost restored to full health, showing that it is a viable approach.

Naturally, this self-healing method is only intended as another line of defense against ionizing radiation, with radiation shielding and radiation-resistant semiconductor technologies serving as the primary defenses.