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

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

In this hotline episode, guest host David Imel answers your questions about digital cameras, iPods, E Ink phones, and the TI-84 graphing calculator being iced out of the Version History Hall of Fame. Further reading: Amazon is launching colorful new Kindles — and a case with physical page-turn buttons NYC is now the first city in America that bans sketchy subscriptions HP’s answer to the MacBook Neo is thinner, lighter, and comes with OLED Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast, of answering your questions, or at least trying to. I'm David Amel. This is Travis Larcuk. 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 1-1. What is it? It's a...

1866, Verge 1-1. Travis has got it. Anyway, we're going to do 90 seconds on the verge, and we'll be right back. This is 90 seconds on the verge for Thursday. October 1st, 26. 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 additions 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. Next, 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 chip set, 16 gigabytes 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 1st, 2026. Visit BetMGM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules.

Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, How to Mind Your Manners. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. It's time for your questions for our wonderful guest host who 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. I had a similar question about cameras, maybe for Allison or David Amel. Like, why can a smartphone company just throw together a digital camera using off the shelf smartphone parts where they have all the sensors, they have the ISPs, they can clear these source screens, they would just need to find glass, right?

that's the only thing that they would really need. So like what's stopping Motorola from just taking a mid-range Android phone and slapping an actual piece of glass in front of it and dropping a little Digi-CAM for like $400? Anyways, just thoughts on, you know, our Digi-Champ trend and why more people aren't trying to take advantage of it. David, what does he mean by ISP, Internet service provider? Not 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 demosakes it and it turns into 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. But I don't think of 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 digicams, 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 to 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 Apo, you've seen all these companies literally making

attachments, these 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 Hossa blad 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.

bad product versus 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 okay. But I just think that there is probably a bigger market opportunity for selling you a smartphone that happens to have a great camera versus a dead. 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 a crappy digicam. Hey, look, if the Nokia 3310 came back, you know, they could sell it as a digicam. 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 meeting to call him for like a month since Lee Lee was talking about how his kid resurfaced an iPod. I just bought an iPod for my girlfriend for her birthday and we've both been using our iPods and CD's and stuff. Part of that is because we want to own music, but part of it is just the form factor is awesome. And we were talking about it and we were 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 a thousand songs at a time on your iPod and you have to go on Apple Music on your computer or phone to like curate that, bring some curation back into this.

You have your library. but I just think that is a 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. I use my phone at home and take my cellular Apple Watch. You added some maps, texting calls could go through. I actually could have an iPod would be a perfect phone factor for like a new piece of hardware

that's kind of the companion to your phone. And with Siri that actually works, you could hold the middle button to dictate the text or search directions or even ask Siri your question. 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 Click Wheels. Thanks. Love the show. Bye. Okay, there's a couple things going on here. I think one of them is that he's definitely messing with us. Yes. And I loved it. Great troll. Yes. You just described a smartphone. Beautiful.

However, obviously, there is a move towards this dedicated technology thing that's going on. You know, people are buying iPods. They're modifying iPods. I assume what you just told us was true that you did buy your girlfriend an 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. And so they had to raise the prices. And everyone says, why don't you just make more film? And in order to do that, Kodak had to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into new cutters, into new film machines.

And they wanted to wait out a few years to make sure this wasn't just a fad, right? Because fads come and go, this thing about having tangible technology might come and go. I've seen 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 way to work in the humble brag that you have a girlfriend. My boyfriend had an iPod for this same reason, my super attractive, very funny and smart boyfriend. And yeah, and he ended up stopping using it just because it died. The hard drive gave up.

And again, and 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. We'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 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 revamp your iPad, your iPod, see this is the problem. 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. I honestly would love to see how long you last using it, just as an experiment. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager, Ontario only.

play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. 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 you're that Quince specializes in. Quince offers high-quality, wardrobe essentials made

with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and merino 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 staples 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. Now 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-N-C-E.com slash verge. Support for the show comes from Idira 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 Idira 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. How does it work? Well, IDIRA replaces permanent permissions with dynamic access so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your own business. With IDIRA, you get unified control by replacing siloed IAM 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 A.A.M. I identities. Secure every identity at your organization with Idera by Palo Alto Networks. Learn more at Palo Alto Networks.com slash IDIRA. Again, that's palo Alto Networks.com slash IDIRA.A. Hi, everyone. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Sky Galloway. Twice a week, we get together on Pivot to sort through the biggest stories in tech business and politics. And we're taking the show back on the road for a live tour in November. So we'll bring hot takes. I'll bring the insight. And the dick jokes and Kara will try. Keyword is try to keep me in check. You'll get to see her hit me in person live.

I'll do it. If someone has to do it. We'll cover AI, whatever chaos Washington is cooked up that week, and every billionaire misbehaving. That's all of them. And you'll also get to participate in audience Q&A. So bring your best questions. Scott will probably answer ones you didn't ask. We also have secret special guests, which you'll enjoy. for every city. Get tickets at pivetour.com. That's pivetour.com. We are selling out, so don't wait,

and we look forward to seeing you. Next question. I know that you're David and Mel and not David Pierce. Correct. But unfortunately, if any David is on this show, we have to talk about the most important technology

to all Davids. Okay. 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 screened on the inside, put an e-ink on the inside, and that would give it a different format so that, you know, you would still have the same old iPhone on the outside. And then on the 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 I'm curious to know what you guys think. Thanks. Bye. First of all, I love that everyone still calls it the iPhone Fold, even though the name has come out in its iPhone duo. That's because it's a bad name. 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.

I 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. And watching a YouTube video on the inside of the phone, not going to be great on an e-ink screen.

Yeah. We've seen some of these companies that make E.E. devices high refresh rate e-ink and it's doable not the best. I'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. 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 magsafe to the back of your phone. Yes, same. Which I think is adorable and wild. Yes. To imagine using. 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. Sahith writes in, all I really want to know is how does the closing of the iPhone duo feel? Is it a dramatic thwarty-y-y-fewo feel? Is it a dramatic thwack or a sad whisper? It is definitely a thwack.

It's a thwack. Can you open it with one hand? I didn't try that. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty wide. 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, long-time 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 swap is going to pollute the content platforms. But I think there's a bigger problem on the horizon. Nearly everyone has spent the last 50s, 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. And even though hacks or platform outages sometimes occur, they seem to be rare enough that the benefits outweigh the risks. My thesis here is that AI-powered hacking and the proliferation of AI-written code that we aren't able to fully understand

or even vet is going to shift our perception of the internet from a relatively reliable place to store photos, stream music, or even run like a business's CRM, to a place where keeping data private and accessible in the cloud or even getting Spotify or Netflix to always be online 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 from basically everything in the way we do today? The internet's dominant role in our society is built on trust in 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. Thanks. 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. have HTTPS because they discovered something called a cash poisoning attack way back in the day, where 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 just not going to use the internet at all, right? And 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, Anthropic OpenAI, 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. What 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. But I think just like regular cybersecurity, as soon as the hacks start happening, companies are also going to be investing in cybersecurity and stopping the hacks from happening, and it will kind of be a cat and 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. 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. Yep. And apparently this is happening to every podcast producer out there. 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 a name.

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 try. 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. You 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 warn against whatever the new scam is out there. That's what I'm worried about more than anything is the individual it's 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? Right. People you know so that they could preface their text to you. Yeah. I feel like I'm going to need to catch up on 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. I am a long-term listener, first time caller. I just wanted to comment on the calculator episode. I have fun memories of the TI 83, going to high school. I even had a friend who had a calculator that the port did not work on. So I helped copy over the programs needed for class by hand, realized, hey, this is easy. And now I am a software engineer for my living. It is instrumental to how I realized 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 does not get into the Hall of Fame. I do agree it should be in the Hall of Fame. 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.

I heard from many people. So I am partly to blame for this, even though I was obviously not on the episode. I helped develop the criteria to get into 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 they're getting into the Hall of Fame. The one that devices usually get 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-grim. graphing 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 graphing 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. Is 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, 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, maybe. 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? It's part of the game. Listen, Texas Instruments doesn't care. They're going to sell the same amount of calculators, no matter what we don't. 100% true. All right. All right.

Well, yeah, do I think that the Ti-84 should be in the Hall of Fame? No. Come for me. I disagree. Come 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. It's just such a delight to work with. Yeah.

So I hope this isn't the last we see of you. Oh, it won't be. Nelai wants 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 and everything.

Just kick back and relax. Hey, that's been the Vergecast. And if you want us to answer your questions, please call the hotline 1866 Verge 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. It's Eric Gomez, Josh Kahas, Brandon Kiefer, and also I'm there.

We'll see you next time. Goodbye. Bye, guys.