2026-07-15 05:00:00
Tim Hardwick: Upcoming OLED iPad Mini Allegedly Uses 60Hz 8.4-Inch Display Panel
Apple is allegedly using a 60Hz 8.4-inch display panel in the upcoming OLED iPad mini, which is expected to be released later this year.
I obviously don’t love that they’re sticking with 60Hz for this device, but more importantly, I don’t understand why they keep pushing this product up market. Especially when the highest end iPhone is expected to be close to this size, not to mention Max iPhones already being pretty close to it already (and with massively better screens), I just don’t understand why they keep pushing up the price of this product.
I’m sure Apple has their reasons, but to me it really feels like this product should be like $249 and it’s kind of like the Mac mini where almost everyone can find a use case for it because it’s so cheap. The iPad mini already starts at $599, and how much do you want to bet that this new model will push the starting price up even more? As far as I can remember, every time Apple has added OLED to a device they sell, the price has gone up at the same time.
And just to get ahead of it, you might ask why I think it’s dumb that they’re limiting the refresh rate while also complaining about the price. As we’ve seen with the MacBook Neo, a lot can be forgiven if you hit the right price. I think if they’re gonna sell the iPad mini as a premium tablet, then it should have premium specs. Like I said, I don’t understand why that product needs to be premium, and therefore I think they can skimp on some specs to make it a great impulse buy for folks.
2026-07-15 03:58:37
Quick Reads has been obsessed with being the best way to save articles you mean to read later, and I think it's done a good job of that. However, there are links I come across that I want to save for later, but they're not for reading, they're something else. For me, they're often a dev tool I want to look at later — like yes, I want to have this link handy later, but I don't need it cluttering up my reading list.
Of course, I could save these links somewhere else, like Reminders, another task manager, or another bookmarking service, but that's not ideal, because now I have multiple places where I need to remember I have links for later saved.
Now, when saving an article to Quick Reads, you can flag it as a "todo" item, which places it in its own list, separate from your reading queue. These links don't get a reading view, they're just links you can mark as complete when you're done with them. These links still appear in your archive and are searchable like anything else. And if you accidentally save something as the wrong format, you can move links back and forth (web UI only for now).
For my API integrators out there, these todo items are just "articles" and are backwards compatible with any existing integration. There is simply a new list value that will show todo for articles that are actually todos. Check it out in the docs.
As far as the saving experience goes, I've tried to make it as seamless as possible. By default, everything still saves as an article to read later. However, on the iOS app (in TestFlight now, coming in the next few days to the public release), you can enable todos on the share sheet in the app settings, which will make it so that when you save something, you'll be asked if it's something to read or a todo item.
The Chrome extension, meanwhile, saves as an article, but you can hit the "todo" button to switch it over if you'd prefer.
There's also no way to demo this here, but I've tried to make the experience of checking off tasks feel nice, so there is a subtle sound effect on the web app and a nice haptic tap on iOS.
Oh, and if you don't want to see todos, you can go to your Reading settings page on the web and hide todos entirely.
And disclaimer, this is not making a Pinboard-style archive of the web page, it is just saving the URL to check out later.
Todos are now available on the web and the Chrome extension for all Quick Reads users. iOS users on the TestFlight also see it now, and both the iOS app and Safari extension will get this as soon as app review lets those updates through.
2026-07-13 06:00:00
2026-07-13 05:41:36
We're just over halfway through 2026, and by my count, I've see 15 2026 releases so far. Here's a from-the-hip ranking what I liked the most to least.
2026-07-10 07:00:00
Lucas Shaw: Netflix Viewers Are Abandoning Shows After One Season
One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. These figures are all through the first four weeks of a show’s release and come straight from Netflix. Adding insult to injury, the latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024,suffered a drop of more than 60% over week one. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month.
I think there's something timeless about traditional TV releases. Netflix shocked the industry when they released the first season of House of Cards all at once, but many years later, it sure seems like the weekly release cadence has much more power. The novelty of getting a whole season at once was fun, but I think it turns out going back to the same show week after week is actually something we enjoyed more than we realized.
I think there's something special about watching a TV season over a few months. I think about the spring of 2025 as the spring where I enjoyed seeing Jason Mantzoukas on Taskmaster. I'll remember mid-2026 as when I watched Widow's Bay or The Pitt. Not only did these shows occupy my attention for longer periods of time, they also got to have a whole ecosystem develop around them. Reaction podcasts and online theorizing all happened as we watched the same thing every week and got to think about it for more than 5 seconds before the next episode auto-played. I'm just saying, cliffhangers work a lot better when you have to sit on them for a while.
Is this why Netflix really struggles to get people to watch past the first season? I don't know. What I do know is that people develop relationships with shows that strengthen as they go on. It's worth noting how weird it is for the first season of a show to be its highest rated. Most shows build an audience over the first few seasons, with seasons three and four really hitting their stride, both artistically and viewer count. Netflix definitely makes some trash, but they also make a lot of good shows as well, and those good shows are also seeing massive audience drops. This isn't some sort of scientific data I'm bringing to the table, but I do think there's something to the idea that the way Netflix distributes their shows, people don't build up a strong relationship with them, so they don't stick with them after the initial novelty of season 1.
2026-07-10 06:20:00
From Asha Sharma's letter to Xbox employees earlier this week (via IGN):
To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset XBOX.
As someone who has been critical of Xbox's strategy, management of studios, and Game Pass at a very fundamental level for many years, there's of course a bit of satisfaction with seeing the head of Xbox agree with all those points. But it's cold comfort for how they're handling the situation now, which I think shows a lack of respect for the medium.
I'm sure I'll write more about this later, but for now, here's an excerpt from the latest Digital Foundry podcast with John Linneman talking about how part of these 3,200 job cuts were effectively gutting the game engine developers at id Software (for reference, gutting the engine development team at id is like gutting the industrial design team at Apple. Okay, you can do that to save money temporarily, but you're cutting the core of what makes them great).
This is the worst thing Xbox has ever done for me personally and a direct insult to the medium and it shows the leadership knows nothing and cares nothing about the industry. They are here to make money exclusively, and they will do it by any means necessary. And I can see why. If you look at the Excel sheet or you ask Copilot, be like, oh, Id Software releases one game every like 4 or 5 years and they have this big custom engine. Why? You know, so let's just cut all that and spend less money and be done with it, you know, either they support studio. I doubt it.
They just make things differently. I just don't understand how even they could achieve that. They said they want to keep the IP. They want more Doom and Wolfenstein, whatever games, but they want it more often and they want to leverage that IP, but you cut half the studio. Who the hell is going to make this rich? Who's going to make this? What's the point? Like, what are they even doing?