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

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 [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of answering your questions, or at least trying to. I'm David Amel, this is Travis Larchuk.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Hello, I'm one of the producers of the show.

• 0:12David Pierce?

  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 a...

• 0:21Speaker 01

  1-866-VERGE-11.

• 0:24David Pierce?

  Travis has got it. Anyway, we're gonna 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, Seaglass Green, Ube, and Fig. Next, New York City's new click-to-cancel rule has finally taken effect,

• 1:07David Pierce?

  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 5 14. 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.

• 1:51David Pierce?

  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.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Believe it or not, the holidays are just around the corner. Do you feel ready? Have you been making your list and checking it twice? Maybe not, but that's okay, because here's a tip that'll help you knock out all of your holiday shopping at once without going broke. I'm talking about Prime Big Deal Days. On October 6th and 7th, get epic deals on home decor, fitness gear, electronics, toys, and so much more with new deals every day. Prime Big Deal Days is here. Shop deals now.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Liz Ann Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring 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 Ann 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/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:23David Pierce?

  We're back.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  It's time for your questions for our wonderful guest host, who so many people have written in saying, "We love David Amel."

• 3:33David Pierce?

  That's nice.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  "Please keep David Amel forever."

• 3:36David Pierce?

  My contract is expiring very soon.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  "We love young and new David."

• 3:41Speaker 01

  All right, David, let's answer some questions. Your first question is tying into the Digicam trend.

• 3:49David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Here we go.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Hi, 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't 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 clearly 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 Digicam for like $400? Anyways, just thoughts on, you know, current Digicam trend

• 4:36Speaker 03

  and why more people aren't trying to take advantage of it?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  David, what does he mean by ISP? Internet service provider?

• 4:44David Pierce?

  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 demosaics it, and it turns it 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 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 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.

• 5:29David Pierce?

  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, the 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.

• 6:14David Pierce?

  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 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

• 6:59David Pierce?

  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.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I do kind of like the idea of a smartphone company maybe taking one of their older models and selling it just as...

• 7:29David Pierce?

  Just as a Digicam?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  A crappy Digicam, yeah.

• 7:31David Pierce?

  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.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Hey, this is Austin. I've actually been meaning to call him for like a month since he was talking about how he's been resurfacing iPod. I just bought an iPod for my girlfriend for her birthday, and we've both been using our iPods, burning CDs 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 1,000 songs at a time on your iPod, and you have to go on Apple Music on your computer or phone to like,

• 8:38Speaker 04

  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 leave my phone at home and take my cellular Apple Watch. If you added some maps, texting, calls, could you have Drew? I actually think iPod would be the perfect form 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 a question. So...

• 9:22Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:36David Pierce?

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

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yes, and I loved it.

• 9:42David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Great troll.

• 9:43David Pierce?

  Yes, you just described a smartphone.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Excellent.

• 9:46David Pierce?

  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

• 10:30David Pierce?

  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 gonna wait a couple more years to see if people actually want it.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:55David Pierce?

  What's your take?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  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

• 11:41Speaker 01

  devices around.

• 11:43David Pierce?

  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 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.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. I know what you're thinking. It feels like you've blinked and suddenly it's October. Before you start asking yourself where the year went, ask yourself if you're ready for the holidays. If the answer isn't a confident yes, don't sweat it. Prime Big Deal Days is here. And that means two days of epic deals with new deals every day. October 6th and 7th only, Prime members can save on home decor, fitness gear, electronics, toys, and so much more. You can get something for everyone on your list, and maybe something special for yourself, too. 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.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Sometimes the best gifts are the ones you just give, well, because. I'm constantly inspired by the people around me, and when I see something that reminds me of someone, I love being able just to get it for them. Whether I'm planning a gift weeks in advance, or I just suddenly think of something at the last minute. Prime makes it easier to find something that feels right and get it when I need it. Prime Big Deal Days is here. Shop deals now.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  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 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

• 14:22Speaker 02

  of last fall. Now that these cooler nights are starting to come back, I'm just genuinely 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/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/verge.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from Ideira 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 Ideira 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, Ideira replaces permanent permissions with dynamic access, so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your own business. With Ideira,

• 15:39Speaker 02

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• 16:16Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. I know what you're thinking. It feels like you've blinked and suddenly it's October. Before you start asking yourself where the year went, ask yourself if you're ready for the holidays. If the answer isn't a confident yes, don't sweat it. Prime Big Deal Days is here. And that means two days of epic deals with new deals every day. October 6th and 7th only, Prime members can save on home decor, fitness gear, electronics, toys, and so much more. You can get something for everyone on your list, and maybe something special for yourself, too. 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.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Sometimes the best gifts are the ones you just give, well, because. I'm constantly inspired by the people around me, and when I see something that reminds me of someone, I love being able just to get it for them. Whether I'm planning a gift weeks in advance, or I just suddenly think of something at the last minute. Prime makes it easier to find something that feels right and get it when I need it. Prime Big Deal Days is here. Shop deals now.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Next question. I know that you're David Amell and not David Pierce.

• 17:34David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  But unfortunately, if any David is on this show, we have to talk about the most important technology to all Davids.

• 17:43David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  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, 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.

• 18:28David Pierce?

  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.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  It's because it's a bad name.

• 18:36David Pierce?

  I agree. And when I talk about it, I also call it the iPhone Fold.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  That's David Pearson's representative here.

• 18:42David Pierce?

  I think colloquially, as a society, we will keep calling it the iPhone Fold.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:46David Pierce?

  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,

• 19:30David Pierce?

  they kind of have to make it a high refresh rate color screen.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:34David Pierce?

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

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:40David Pierce?

  We've seen some, uh, some of these companies that make e-ink 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.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:00David Pierce?

  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.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:19David Pierce?

  Yes, same.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Which I think is adorable and wild.

• 20:23David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  To imagine using.

• 20:25David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Also, we received another question about the iPhone Duo that I want to run by you.

• 20:30David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  You've touched the iPhone Duo.

• 20:32David Pierce?

  I've touched it.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Okay, here's the question. So Heath 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 whisper?"

• 20:43David Pierce?

  It is definitely a thwack.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  It's a thwack?

• 20:46David Pierce?

  It's a thwack.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Can you open it with one hand?

• 20:49David Pierce?

  I didn't try that.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:50David Pierce?

  Um, I mean, it's pretty wide. So doing that would be very, uh, the audio listeners can't see this, but my hand would be strained.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:00David Pierce?

  It would be difficult. You could maybe, you could maybe pinch it, but all of the press materials show them opening it with two hands.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:07David Pierce?

  I think that's probably the, the core experience.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  All right. It's a thwack.

• 21:12David Pierce?

  It's a thwack. That is a good question. It's important.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  This next question is a real thinker.

• 21:19David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Here we go.

• 21:21Speaker 06

  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 slop is going to pollute the content platforms. But I think there's a bigger problem on 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. And even though hacks or platform, 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

• 22:06Speaker 06

  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 for basically everything in the way we do today? The internet's dominant role in our society is built on trust and its stability.

• 22:51Speaker 06

  And I don't think enough of our discourse about AI is talking about how little it might take to break that trust. Thanks.

• 22:59David Pierce?

  All right, this is a great question. The question of trust on the internet is very important. Uh, it reminds me of the reason we have HTTPS, because they discovered something called a cache 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.

• 23:41David Pierce?

  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, uh, 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, uh, various OpenAI agents just hacking into different government websites. If they can hack into government websites, they're probably going to start attacking businesses.

• 24:23David Pierce?

  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 hacks start happening, companies are also going to be investing in cybersecurity and like 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, and I could definitely see a future where that happens.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Totally. And I, I think that, I mean, I have, uh, talked about on this show how I am being impersonated by AI.

• 25:09David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Uh, and apparently this is happening to every podcast producer out there. I, I mean, I was on NPR's website and at the bottom of the page now, it says, basically, "A warning against this thing."

• 25:22David Pierce?

  We will not send you any.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it says, "We will not ask you for money if we are asking you to be a guest on NPR."

• 25:27David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Uh, and I've, I've looked up other stories of this happening to other people. And just, uh, earlier this week, one of the producers on this show put in Slack that they got like a phishing message from the boss of The Verge, the publisher of The Verge.

• 25:45David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Uh, it like signed from her.

• 25:47David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  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 pose as somebody else.

• 26:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  You know, before, when it was bespoke, you know, scams, you had to put a little bit more work into it. Uh, 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. I, I, that's what I'm worried about more than anything is the individual. It's scams and things like that.

• 26:38David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  And expanding our internet literacy to cover this new, like, do you need to come up with a code word in person?

• 26:45David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  With people you know, so that they could preface their texts to you?

• 26:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, I feel like I'm going to need to catch up on the, uh, the new internet literacy as well. This is going to develop very quickly and I hope we're ready for it.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. We're going to end on, uh, litigating something that happened on a different podcast.

• 27:05David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Here we go.

• 27:07Speaker 07

  Hi, my name is Ken. I am a long-term listener, first-time caller. I just wanted to comment on the calculator episode.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  It's a version history.

• 27:20Speaker 07

  I have fond 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.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Spoiler alert for the end of that episode, it does not get into the Hall of Fame.

• 27:58David Pierce?

  I do agree it should be in the Hall of Fame, so.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  You and a number of other people who wrote in.

• 28:04David Pierce?

  Do you not?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I will say, all right, so Ken, you're not alone. I heard from many people.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  So I am partly to blame 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.

• 28:26David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  And I said, we need to be transparent about how things are getting into the Hall of Fame.

• 28:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  The one that 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-graffing calculator, and that is part of the story.

• 28:54David Pierce?

  You could, 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.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:11David Pierce?

  I think that makes it good.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think it's a good, is it remarkably good? I don't know. But I will say, here's, 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, just one is enough.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:00David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  You know, arguing over whether, whether something got snubbed from a Hall of Fame, whether this thing should even be in the Hall of Fame. That's the fun, right?

• 30:08David Pierce?

  It's part of the game.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Right?

• 30:10David Pierce?

  It's part of the game.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Listen, Texas Instruments doesn't care. They're gonna sell the same amount of calculators, no matter what we do.

• 30:16David Pierce?

  Hundred percent true, hundred percent true. All right.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  All right, well, yeah. Do I think that the TI-84 should be in the Hall of Fame? No.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Come for me.

• 30:28David Pierce?

  I disagree.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Come for me.

• 30:29David Pierce?

  I'll come for Travis. Please, I'll come for Travis.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  All right, David.

• 30:34David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  You're almost done with this run of guest hosting for us.

• 30:37David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  I just wanted to say thank you again on behalf of everybody.

• 30:41David Pierce?

  Thank you.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  You've been just such a delight to work with.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  So I hope we, I hope this isn't the last we see of you.

• 30:47David Pierce?

  Oh, it won't be. Neelai wants to lock me in a storage room somewhere.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  I guarantee you'll at least be on tomorrow's episode.

• 30:54David Pierce?

  That's true, that's true.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  All right, I'll, 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 1-866-VERGE-11 or email us at [email protected]. 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.

• 31:28David Pierce?

  Bye, guys.

• 31:32Speaker 08

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