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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of answering your questions, or at least trying to. I'm David Imel. This is Travis Laruk.

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 Verge11. What is it? It's uh...

Travis's 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, 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, Sealass Green, UB, 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 passed 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 speced much higher, up to an Intel Core 7 350 chipset, 16 GB 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.

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 giftgiver 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 giftgivers 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.

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We're back.

That's nice.

My contract is expiring very soon.

Here we go.

Not internet service provider, that is the image signal processor. Uh, it's the part of the chip that takes in all of the information from the camera and it demos it and it turns it into an actual photo. This is a great question. Um, 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 a lot of smartphone companies want to go about that because it's just another SKU 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. They're 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 camera, 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, 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 like 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-unquote 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 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 dedicated camera that happens to have a phone on the back.

Just as a digicam. Yeah.

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.

Okay, there's a couple things going on here. I think uh one of them is that he's definitely messing with us.

And I loved it.

Great troll.

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.

What's your take?

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 like revamp 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, um, 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. Um, just as an experiment.

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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. 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 this Prime Big Deal Days, October 6th and 7th.

Correct.

Okay, here we go.

Uh first of all, I love that everyone still calls it the iPhone Fold even though the name has come out and it's iPhone Duo. Because it's a bad name.

As David Pierce's representative here, I think colloquially as a society, we will keep calling it the iPhone Fold.

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 e-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, we've seen some uh some of these companies that make e-ink devices, high refresh rate e-ink, doable, not the best. Uh 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 Nothing will do it. 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.

Which I think is adorable and wild.

To imagine using.

Okay.