We answer your questions about an iPod comeback, an E Ink iPhone Duo, and more

0:00Welcome to the Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of answering your questions or at least trying to. I'm David Amel, this is Travis Larchuk. Hello, I'm one of the producers of the show. Today we're going to try to answer some of your hotline questions at the end of the show we always say. Call the hotline at Verge 11, what is it? It's a... 2866 Verge 11. Travis has got it. Anyway, we're gonna do 96 on the Verge and we'll be right back. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Thursday, October 1st, 2026. Amazon just launched a new generation of Kindles, which are a millimeter thinner and 30% faster at opening books than the previous generation. The e-readers also now come in an aluminum casing option for a little more money, so if you're hoping to get something a little nicer in the hand, they've got you covered. The Signature editions also come with Pogo pins on the back that are compatible with an $80 magnetic case that includes physical page turn buttons. And they've got new colors, Alpine sky, Sea Glass Green, Ube, and Fig.

1:03Next, New York City's new Click to Cancel Rule has finally taken effect, requiring businesses to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up. That means if a gym lets you join online, it also has to let you cancel online. The city expects the new rule to save New Yorkers between $21.5 million to $162.5 million annually, and stated that no one should need 45 minutes of hold music to stop paying for something that they never wanted in the first place. Hopefully we'll see this past in other cities going forward. And finally, HP has launched its response to the MacBook Neo in the form of the OmniBook 514. The laptop comes in lots of fun colors, has an OLED screen, and starts at $700. The laptop can be specced much higher up to an Intel Core 7350 chipset, 16GB of RAM, and up to a terabyte of storage. At this point, there are quite a few MacBook Neo competitors in the Windows laptop space, so pick your poison. You can read more at theverge.com, that's 90 seconds on the verge for Thursday, October 1, 2026.

2:04Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Maybe you have a project or hobby you've been meeting to tackle one day, like a much needed upgrade to your holiday decor, or that cookie decorating kit you've been eyeing for years. Well, mark your calendars because Prime Big Deal Days is coming on October 6th and 7th, and you can turn that someday project into today's reality. With two days of deals, there's never been a better time to cross that long awaited project off your list, and Prime Big Deal Days is your perfect excuse to make it happen. Whether it's getting that stand mixer for making those holiday meals, or building that weight room you've been waiting for, Prime Big Deal Days is your chance to finally make your move. Mark your calendars, shop new deals every day, this Prime Big Deal Days, October 6th and 7th. This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week hosts Liz and Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin had a fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research,

3:11bringing you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Liz and, as they explore, questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting, and what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at Schwab.com slash on investing, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! It's time for your questions for our wonderful guest host to so many people have written in saying, we love David and Mel. That's nice. Please keep David and Mel forever. My contract is expiring very soon. We love young and new David. All right, David, let's answer some questions. Your first question is tying into the DigiCam trend. Here we go. Hi, I just listened to the episode where Andrew answered a question about cobbling together EVs from like Off the Shelf Parts.

4:15I had a similar question about cameras, maybe for Alison or David Mel. Why can a smartphone company just throw together a digital camera using Off the Shelf Smartphone Parts? They have all the sensors, they have the ISPs, they can clear these source screens. They would just need to find glass. That's the only thing that they would really need. So what's stopping Motorola from just taking a big range Android phone and slapping an actual piece of glass in front of it and dropping a little DigiCam for $400? It's just thoughts on the, you know, the current DigiCam trend and why more people aren't trying to take advantage of it. David, what does he mean by ISP? Internet service provider? Internet service provider. That is the image signal processor. It's the part of the chip that takes in all of the information from the camera and it demosaics it and it turns it to an actual photo. This is a great question. I think that a mid-range Android phone with a very small sensor with a large piece of glass could be very interesting.

5:21But I don't think that a lot of smartphone companies want to go about that because it's just another skew of something that they have to make and sell. And generally the companies that are making DigiCam's, you know, they don't sell them at a high margin, not super expensive. They're either super expensive or, you know, they're super cheap. And some companies have tried this, right? Samsung did this way back in the day. They had a dedicated camera. You have to make the glass. That is the biggest part and you bring this up in your call. Glass is hard to make for multiple reasons. Both it's very hard to make it pure. It's very hard to make it, you know, clean and have a big aperture and all these things. That's a whole industry in itself. And you could probably outsource that to somebody else. But then you've just got a new production line. You've got all these things going. And I think basically what these smartphone companies want to do instead is just make the smartphone as good of a camera as possible. So you've seen Vivo, you've seen Oppo, you've seen all these companies literally making attachments.

6:22These like lens attachments that they slap onto the phone. And I think that that is where the experimental side of the frontier is happening right now. A lot of the Chinese companies are doing that. As far as like DigiCam, you know, a lot of companies have tried converting your phone into a little DigiCam with these Moto Mods and things like that. Motorola did try this. If you remember the Moto Z something, it might have just been Moto Z. But they had an attachment on the back that I believe it was like a Hasselblad quote, quote, lens that went on the back. It wasn't great. And I just think that they worry a little bit about, you know, half-assing a bad product, which is like spending a lot of work and resources on a good product. However, if these companies were brave enough, they could do it. We've also seen companies that have literally put an Android phone on the back of a camera, which is sort of the other way around. And they've released these things at CES and they were slow and not great. And they tried to run Lightroom natively and they were, they were okay.

7:24But I just think that there is probably a bigger market opportunity for showing you a smartphone that happens to have a great camera versus a dedicated camera that happens to have a phone on the back. Yeah. I do kind of like the idea of a smartphone company maybe taking one of their older models and selling it just as. Just as a digi cam. I can't be digi cam. Hey, look, if the Nokia 3310 came back, you know, they could sell it as a digi cam. Just put a big screen on it. That's it. All right. Speaking of gadgets that only do one thing instead of trying to do all of the things, our next question is about some, what I guess at this point you might call retro technology. Hey, this is Austin. I've actually been meaning for all of them for like a month since the late was talking about how he's been. A research is an iPod. I just bought an iPod for my girlfriend for a birthday and we've both been using our iPods for and see these and stuff.

8:25Yeah, it's because we want to own music, but part of it is just the form factors. Awesome. And we're talking about it and we're like, they need to bring back an iPod. I would buy that exact form factor for $500 and I would cancel Spotify today and get Apple music if it worked with a physical non phone iPod. Like maybe you can just store 1000 songs at a time on your iPod and you have to go on Apple music on your computer phone to like create that. Bring some curation back into this. You have your library, but I just think that is no brainer. If you want to do some feature creep, I would love to have a really good camera on an iPod. I use an Apple watch kind of as my dumb phone, so my phone at home and take my cellular Apple watch. I got it from maps texting calls. Okay, is that the same as the first time factor for like a new piece of hardware that's kind of the companion to your phone and which series actually works.

9:30You could hold the middle button to dictate the text for search directions or even have serious questions. So to me, it just seems obvious that it's time to bring back the iPod. Maybe this week someone will hear this at Apple and decide that people don't want pervert AirPods. They want quick wheels. Thanks. Love the show. Okay, there's a couple of things going on here. I think one of them is that he's definitely messing with us. Yes, and I loved it. Yes, great troll. Yes, you just described a smartphone. Yes, it's beautiful. However, obviously there is a move towards this dedicated technology thing that's going on. People are buying iPods, they're modifying iPods. I assume what you just told us was true that you did buy your reference iPod and you put songs on it. I've seen people doing that. The question becomes, is this the future or is this a fad? And I've seen this happen so many times in 2020 and 2021. Film was blowing up again and there was not enough capacity at Kodak to make enough film.

10:32So they had to raise the prices and everyone says, why don't you just make more film? In order to do that, Kodak had to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into new cutters and to new film machines. And they wanted to wait out a few years to make sure this wasn't just a fad. Because fads come and go, this thing about having tangible technology might come and go. You see a lot of people who want a dumb phone, they use it for a while, they probably make a YouTube video about how it saved their life and then they go back to their smartphone. So I think before these companies come out and just start pumping out iPods again, they're probably going to wait a couple more years to see if people actually want it. Yeah. What's your take? So my take is actually my boyfriend and wait a work in the humble brag that you have a girlfriend. My boyfriend had an iPod for the same reason, my super attractive, very funny and smart boyfriend. And yeah, and he ended up stopping using it just because it died.

11:35The hard drive gave up. And again, just the convenience factor of it, I think that for a company to make a dedicated device like this for Apple to do it, I think they just don't see there being a big enough market of people who want to carry multiple devices around. And I've almost already seen a beta test of this, right? There's a lot of phone manufacturers that will come out and make a dumb phone and they'll just say, it's just your weekend phone. It doesn't have the ability to do it if any of the things that make you sad. And so you can just use it on the weekend and it's great and they all fail. And it's practically the same idea. So you know, if you're out there and you want to like revamp your iPad, your iPod, see this. You want to revamp your iPod, you want to put an SSD in it, you want to put Bluetooth, you want to put Wi-Fi, you want to put a camera as you would like to do. Go for it. And there's a vibrant community of people that are doing that.

12:35I honestly would love to see how long you last using it just as an experiment. Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Some of us are blessed with a natural ability to do gift giving right. You probably have a few in your life. People who can make a mental ledger of what their loved ones like and buy things here and there throughout the year. My mom has always been the best gift giver in my life. She could even make the smallest gift feel incredibly special because you knew that she had really thought about that person receiving it. It doesn't have to be the biggest or the most expensive gift. It just has to show someone you were thinking about them. Well, for the rest of us, here's a tip. Prime Big Deal Days is coming October 6th and 7th. That means that for two straight days, you can get deals on those kitchen gadgets for your dad, electronics for your brother, fitness equipment for your bestie, toys for the cousins, and so much more. There's new deals dropping every day so you can become one of those expert gift givers that we all know.

13:37And it's all happening with plenty of lead time into the holidays. So no more scrambling to come up with something last minute. The hardest part will be finding a good hiding place for it all. Mark your calendars. Shop new deals every day at this Prime Big Deal Days. October 6th and 7th. Support for the show comes from Quince. We all have our favorite clothes we love to break out when things get a little chillier. Maybe it's that cool bomber jacket or the sweater that you could wear literally every day. These are exactly the kinds of pieces that Quince specializes in. Quince offers high quality, wardrobe essentials made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and marino wool. So it's been about a year now since I started picking up Quince. And one of the things that they talk about is how they just offer those steeples that end up being the things that you go to and grab in your closet time and time again. And honestly, it's kind of true. For me, that's become the Mongolian cashmere quarters of sweater I got towards the end of last fall.

14:40Now that these cooler nights are starting to come back, I'm just generally excited to reach into my closet and grab what became my old, reliable for last year. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash verge. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q, u, i, and c e dot com slash verge. Support for the show comes from idea by Palo Alto Networks. Every new cloud workload or AI agent your team sends out is another identity that gets permanent access to your systems. And in 2026, those non human identities with access outnumber actual human identities, 109 to 1, you need a tool built to manage them all, human, machine, and AI. That's exactly what idea by Palo Alto Networks was designed to do. It's one identity platform for all and it outshines legacy tools that were only built to manage human employees.

15:46How does it work? Well, idea replaces permanent permissions with dynamic access so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your own business. With idea, you get unified control by replacing siloed I am or identity and access management, Pam, modern privilege access management and governance tools all with a single control plane. And it does that across human machine and AI identities secure every identity at your organization with idea by Palo Alto Networks. Learn more at palo Alto networks dot com slash ID I R A again, that's palo Alto networks dot com slash ID I R A. Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Some of us are blessed with a natural ability to do gift giving right. You probably have a few in your life, people who can make a mental ledger of what their loved ones like and buy things here and there throughout the year.

16:49My mom has always been the best gift giver in my life. She could even make the smallest gift feel incredibly special because you knew that she had really thought about that person receiving it. It doesn't have to be the biggest or the most expensive gift. It just has to show someone you were thinking about them. Well, for the rest of us, here's a tip. Prime big deal days is coming October 6th and 7th. That means that for two straight days, you can get deals on those kitchen gadgets for your dad, electronics for your brother, fitness equipment for your bestie, toys for the cousins, and so much more. There's new deals dropping every day so you can become one of those expert gift givers that we all know. And it's all happening with plenty of lead time into the holidays. So no more scrambling to come up with something last minute. The hardest part will be finding a good hiding place for it all. Mark your calendars, shop new deals every day at this prime big deal days October 6th and 7th. Next question. I know that you're David and Mel and not David Pierce. But unfortunately, if any David is on this show, we have to talk about the most important technology to all David's.

18:03Okay. There we go. Hi, my name is Eric and I was just listening to your episode about the iPhone fold. And one of my thoughts was, what if Apple instead of putting their typical screens on the inside, putting E ink inside, and that would give it a different format so that you would still have the same old iPhone on the outside and then on inside. It would be E ink reader and possibly for like taking notes and all that other stuff. I don't know. I thought that might be something that could be a different way of exploring what could be done with these phones and curious to know what you guys think. Thanks. First of all, I love that everyone still calls it the iPhone fold, even though the name has come out in its iPhone duo. It's a bad day. I agree. And when I talk about it, I also call it the iPhone fold as David Pierce's representative here. I think colloquially as a society, we will keep calling it the iPhone fold. Yeah.

19:06I love your idea. I think we would all love a device that has more E ink in it. And in particular, you know, Apple made the inside screen of the iPhone fold, the same aspect ratio as the outside. The idea for that was to be able to continue your app experience, but in a bigger format. Right. So you don't have to code a bunch of different aspect ratios. You just do a couple. Obviously they have to code the like, you know, half folded mode and the like side by side, whatever. But the inner screen being ink would be sick. I think we're all like, I want it to be a book. I want it to be this. The problem is that because they want the continue on feature to be such a core part of the phone with it being the same aspect ratio on the outside and the inside. They kind of have to make it a high refresh rate color screen. Yeah. And watching a YouTube video, you know, on the inside of the phone, not going to be great on an E ink screen. Yeah. We've seen some some of these companies that make E ink devices high refresh rate ink and it's doable. Not the best.

20:08I'm sure that there will be a company that does it because there have already been a lot of foldable phones. Foldables will get commodified to an extent where we're going to start seeing some weird ideas coming out of foldable phones. Yeah. I'm sure a company like Technics or something will make something like this. And personally, I would really like that because I'd really like to have an actual book with E ink on the inside of my phone. So instead of doom scrolling, I'm reading a book. I think it's a great idea that is more compelling to me than the tiny little screen that you can mag safe to the back of your phone. Yes. Same. Which I think is adorable and wild. Yes. Imagine using. Yes. Also, we received another question about the iPhone duo that I want to run by you. Okay. You've touched the iPhone duo. I've touched it. Okay. Here's the question. So he writes in, all I really want to know is how does the closing of the iPhone duo feel? Is it a dramatic thwack or a sad whisperer? It is definitely a thwack. It's a thwack. It's a thwack. Can you open it with one hand?

21:08I didn't try that. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty wide. Okay. So doing that would be very... The audio listeners can't see this, but my hand would be strained. Okay. It would be difficult. You could maybe pinch it, but all of the press materials show them opening it with two hands. Okay. I think that's probably the core experience. All right. It's a thwack. It's a thwack. That is a good question. It's important. This next question is a real thinker. Okay. Here we go. Hello. This is Eli Johnson, longtime listener. I'm calling with a question about the future of the internet. We spend a lot of time talking about the dead internet theory, this idea that bots and AI Slops going to pollute the content platforms. But I think there's a bigger problem than the horizon. Nearly everyone has spent the last 15 years moving all kinds of data and services to the cloud with this virtually unchallenged assumption that storing and accessing our data via the internet is convenient and safer and cheaper.

22:11And even though hacks or platform outages sometimes occur, they seem to be very enough that the benefits outweigh the risk. My piece is here is that AI powered hacking and the proliferation of the I written code that we aren't able to fully understand. Or even that is going to shift our perception of the internet from a relatively reliable place. The store photos, free music or even run like a business and CRM. To a place where keeping data private and accessible in the cloud or even getting spotify our netfix to always be our line is a bit like flipping a coin. Probably unlikely that we start to always expect things not to work online. But even if AI increases hacking by like 10 or 15% or online platform outages go up by like 5%. Is that enough to tip the risk reward balance of relying on the internet basically everything in the way we do today? The internet's dominant role in our society is built on trust and its stability. And I don't think enough of our discourse about AI is talking about how little it might take to break that trust.

23:17Thanks. All right. This is a great question. The question of trust on the internet is very important. It reminds me of the reason we have HTTPS because they discovered something called a cash poisoning attack way back in the day. Or you could go into the DNS and you could reroute the person from the website they thought they were going to to a fake version of that website. They had to make the internet secure right there was this big push to get everyone on a version of their website that was signed right which guaranteed that this was the real version of the website. And the reason for this is because if you can't trust that the website that you're going to is the real version of that website. You're not going to use the internet at all right. So that was very important. Your question I think is very poignant and related to that because yeah, I kind of agree with you. I think we are probably going to see a lot more of these hacks. And that's the reason why these companies and TheroppyCopenAI have been introducing these data security ventures right like mythos was supposed to be the like secure your websites before the agents break into it kind of thing.

24:24What part of that is just marketing you know I'm not totally sure. But it is clear that a lot of things are being hacked really easily right we've talked about various open AI agents just hacking into different government websites. If they can hack into government websites they're probably going to start attacking businesses. So you know we've yet to see that many of these happen so far. But this is something that I think about quite frequently. And I think but I think just like regular cybersecurity as soon as the hack start happening companies are also going to be investing in cyber security and like stopping the hacks from happening and it will kind of be a cat in mouse game. I personally don't think we'll get to a point where you're not going to be able to trust that anything is actually going to be working at any given time. Because these companies have a lot to lose for people not using their service because they can't trust it so that's a good incentive. But it's a great question and I could definitely see a future where that happens totally and I think that. I mean I have talked about on this show how I am being impersonated by AI.

25:29And apparently this is happening to every podcast. I mean I was on NPR's website and at the bottom of the page now it says basically a warning against this thing. We will not send you any. Yeah it says we will not ask you for money if we are asking you to be a guest on NPR. Wow. And I've looked up other stories of this happening to other people. And just earlier this week one of the producers on this show put in slack that they got like a fishing message from the boss of the Verge, the publisher of the Verge. Wow. It like signed from her. Wow. So I do think that where we already are or are going to be soon is just not necessarily even being able to trust messages that we're getting from people who are purporting to be. Our friends because of these AI systems that can easily go to your social media and poses somebody else. Yeah.

26:29You know before when it was bespoke you know scams you had to put a little bit more work into it. So the thing that I'm concerned about in terms of trust on the internet is you know I look at folks like my own parents who I have to routinely worn against whatever the new scam is out there. I that's what I'm worried about more than anything is the individual. It scams and things like that and expanding our internet literacy to cover this new. Like do you need to come up with a code word in person people you know so that they could preface their text to you. Yeah. I feel like I'm going to catch up on the the new internet literacy as well. This is going to develop very quickly and I hope we're ready for it. Yeah. Okay. We're going to end on litigating something that happened on a different podcast. Okay. Here we go. Hi, my name is Ken.

27:29I am a long-term listener percent caller. I just wanted to comment on the cast leader episode. Sometimes new administrators like me is aware of everything that I am within. I try to know that. Some altar school supplement worried me being aware of it all, that's everything. And I want to know that if I had to pass a hard time I would have it if I could, I'd have spent a lot of doing it. About what I was listening to at Hök waremi Beach Karrill, that I loved what I do. And I thought that it deserves a place in the Hall of Fame. So please reconsider. Spoiler alert. For the end of that episode, it was not getting into the Hall of Fame. I do agree it should be in the Hall of Fame. So you and a number of other people who wrote in. Do you not? Well, first of all, I will say, all right, so Ken, you're not alone.

28:29I heard from many people. So I am partly deploying for this, even though I was obviously not on the episode. I helped develop the criteria to get us to the Hall of Fame. In the first season of version history, there were no rules for getting into the Hall of Fame. And I said, we need to be transparent about how things are getting into the Hall of Fame. The one that that device is usually caught up on is, was this remarkably good or remarkably bad? So the TI-83 was not considered either remarkably good or remarkably bad, which is why it did not get into the Hall of Fame because it's just a mid-grafing calculator. And that is part of the story. You could make the argument that it's remarkably good because of how iconic it is. But I do agree it's hard to say whether a graph in calculator is good or bad. I would say it's good because it's so iconic and because you could play games on it. Sure. I think that makes it good. Yeah. You know, I think it's a good,

29:33is it remarkably good? I don't know. But I will say, here's what I'll tell you, Ken. First of all, there's been a lot of buzz around perhaps we do a special episode of version history where we relitigate the robbed Hall of Fame and also things that shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame. That might be coming. Secondly, I am going to encourage for the next season that we tape for these criteria to not be so, you know, maybe you don't need a three out of three to get into the Hall of Fame. Maybe you don't need to say yes to all three questions. Maybe just one is enough. So I will do my best to avoid situations like this in the future. But also, that's part of Hall of Fame's baby. That's true. You know, arguing over whether something got snubbed from a Hall of Fame, whether this thing should even be in the Hall of Fame, that's the fun. That's part of the game. Right? That's part of the game. Listen, Texas Instruments doesn't care. They're good to sell the last calculator. No matter what. 100% true. 100% true. All right. All right. Well,

30:39yeah, do I think that the TI-84 should be in the Hall of Fame? No. Come for me. You should for me. I'll come for Travis. Please. I'll come for Travis. All right. David. Yes. You're almost done with this run of guest hosting for us. That's true. I just want to say thank you again on behalf of everybody. Thank you. You've been just such a delight to work with. So I hope we I hope this isn't the last we see of you. Oh, it won't be. Neil, I want to lock me in a storage room somewhere. I guarantee you'll at least be on tomorrow's episode. That's true. That's true. All right. I'll wrap us up with the credits to everything. Just kick back and relax. Hey, that's been the Verge cast. And if you want us to answer your questions, please call the hotline 1-866-1-1 or email us at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and our staff is the best team in podcasting.

31:39It's Eric Gomez, Josh Cajas, Brandon Kiefer, and also I'm there. We'll see you next time. Goodbye. Bye, guys. Real innovation is powered by real people. MX Corporate provides 24-7 expertise on demand resources and the trusted backing of American Express. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is MX Corporate. Get started at go.amx-amx-corporate terms apply.