
Why Graphing Calculators Still Cost So Much - creamyhorror
http://mic.com/articles/125829/your-old-texas-instruments-graphing-calculator-still-costs-a-fortune-heres-why
======
dkbrk
This article doesn't actually directly address the question in the title. It
observes that Texas Instruments calculators are still in wide use (due to
network effects and some specific advantages over competing technologies), and
that the calculators are a very high profit-margin product for TI. What I find
somewhat more interesting is that TI is evidently in a monopoly position and
has no real incentive to seriously lower prices or to produce a new, cheaper,
and improved version of their baseline model.

I also find it interesting how relatively little attention is given to the
advantage of tactile buttons:

> Plus, she says, her kids love the fact that the calculators are clunky and
> tactile, an opinion anyone who misses the tactile, QWERTY keyboards of
> earlier smartphones shares. > "The learning curve is higher, but the
> buttons... they love pushing 'em," Yenca said.

Frankly, I've never seen a touchscreen interface for _anything_ that could
effectively compete with a well-designed physical interface for experienced
users. Touchscreens are excellent for their flexibility but have serious
drawbacks when used over a long period of time, when precision is paramount,
or when there is a large space of inputs.

What's really needed is more or less the same physical input layout but with a
larger, high-resolution screen. I would think the market in the US is
sufficiently large that even if TI doesn't see the need to produce newer,
cheaper and improved models, there's space for another player, say from China,
to produce a better product.

~~~
bendykstra
> I also find it interesting how relatively little attention is given to the
> advantage of tactile buttons

If I remember correctly, while in programming mode, almost all TI-BASIC
keywords could be input by pressing a menu button followed by a number. You
could be very efficient once you learned the combinations. By the time I
started high school, I had learned the menus well enough that I was writing
games in class while concealing the calculator under the desk. (Of course, as
I found out later, my teachers weren't fooled for a second.)

~~~
Sanddancer
Exactly. Everything in TI basic, least on the 82 I had way back in the day, is
a keyword that you can pull in from a menu. Because of this, there was no need
to remember what that function was named. Because of that, it was trivial to
write all those little functions that just might be on the test, plus all
those games and other diversions. I mean, what's a calculator without a game
of craps on it?

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blazespin
Because you can't text questions for outside help or use a general problem
solving app on a graphing calculator. These are safe for exams.

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theintern
While I agree that it's ridiculous that this is the case, I side with the
students who were given a choice and chose the physical calculator. The
thought of doing Numerical Analysis problems and long calculations on an app
sounds excruciating, and I know that Accounting classes would have taken an
order of magnitude longer without tactile feedback.

The replacement for a $100 problem is to buy students iPads and use an app and
touchscreen? That's not a viable solution whatsoever for the vast majority of
schools. The real solution is for schools to simply advocate using a cheaper
and similarly functioned calculator. I used a Casio EL531 all through school
and college and while it didn't graph, it covered me for everything in an
Engineering degree.

~~~
anon4
Maybe TI should upgrade the processor in it a bit? Put a better screen? Maybe
one based on e-ink? Imagine a LISP machine with dedicated calculator buttons,
the size of a small kindle.

An iPad with an app is not the solution, but how come graphing calculators
haven't advanced at all.

~~~
electroly
Go to TI's website right now and look at their graphing calculators section.
Seriously, this isn't a thought experiment. Go check it out:

[https://education.ti.com/en/us/products#!product=graphing-
ca...](https://education.ti.com/en/us/products#!product=graphing-calculators)

They DO have vastly improved and modernized calculators. The Nspire line has
fast processors, lots of storage, bright color screens, touch capability,
greatly improved software, etc. They don't really even cost more than the "old
school" TI graphing calculators. TI can really only be blamed for not dropping
the price on their old models. It would be misleading to suggest that TI
hasn't worked on more advanced calculators.

~~~
greydius
Aside from the color screen and faster processor, these new Nspire calculators
have no new features except gimmicky stuff (No one is going to buy a
calculator because they need a 2"x2" spreadsheet). Even my TI-89, which I
bought in 1999, has the same basic functionality. (Maybe that's why the
TI-89's price hasn't changed -- it costs as much as the Nspire CAS). The only
truly useful improvement TI has made is a rechargeable battery pack.

~~~
jcrawfordor
The NSpire OS is significantly more usable than the 83+ and 89 that I went
through school with. In one case, I was able to put a dataset acquired from
measurements into the spreadsheet editor, run a linear regression, get the r^2
for the regression, then draw the graph of points and line and save it in just
a few seconds of menu choices - without ever having done that on an NSpire
before. This would have taken me significantly longer on the older models if I
hadn't already memorized the procedure.

So I wouldn't say that the NSpire has any radically new features, but I think
that it's a lot more approachable then the older models. It feels less like
something that you have to specifically learn to use and more like an
intuitive software package - which is perhaps what our author is really
getting at when they talk about apps.

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exDM69
Can anyone suggest a viable alternative for the TI graphing calculator? A
mobile app would be great, but the ones I tried from the app store were pretty
awful.

So far the best affordable alternative I've tried is... a TI calculator
emulator. Which requires a ROM dumped from a TI calculator.

I quickly tried out the Desmos webapp suggested in the article, but it's
rather basic and while it might work for a high school student, it's not a
serious tool for scientific and engineering work that the TI can be. It does
pretty plots but that's about it (I generally use gnuplot for that, and it has
more useful tools than Desmos has, albeit a bit difficult to use and
discover).

Back in my high school days, I was pretty bad ass with the TI-85 graphing
calculator, to the point that I felt like cheating because I could easily use
it to solve and verify most exercises and exams. I could have learned a whole
lot more maths had I not had such a powerful calculator. And it wasn't even
one of the fancy symbolic calculators that high school kids these days have.

The last time I put my TI through its paces was in university orbital
mechanics class where I used it to do initial orbit determination of an
asteroid based on three observations. That wouldn't have been possible without
a powerful calculator, with variables in memory and such.

These days my calculator has fallen into disuse because I need it so
irregularly that I don't have a good reason to carry it around. But it would
be great to have something as powerful in my pocket at all times.

~~~
russdill
hp-48gx emulator?

~~~
tonyarkles
Funny enough, that's what you get when you purchase an HP-49 (not even sure if
it's still available, but it's what I bought for engineering school 13 years
ago). The story goes that HP couldn't get a faster version of the (12MHz
Saturn?) CPU in the '48, but wanted to release a faster version.

Since they couldn't get a faster compatible CPU but wanted to continue using
their battle-hardened codebase, they decided to replace the CPU with a 200MHz
ARM and write an emulator. I suppose that's maybe easier than trying to port a
heavily optimized codebase to a new architecture. Plus, moving forward, you
could write C code and compile it directly for ARM.

If I'm remembering right, I did manage to get a C "hello world" building with
gcc before losing interest.

~~~
makomk
Wikipedia reckons that the fab they were using could no longer make the Saturn
CPU, and I guess it was a lot cheaper to write an emulator at that point than
to redesign it for a more modern process node.

~~~
tonyarkles
Awesome! It was quite a while ago, glad I got most of the details right!

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Sir_Cmpwn
If I ever find the time to mature KnightOS [1] to a state that's usable for
the classroom, I hope to make my next project a calculator whose hardware is
open source that can be sold for much cheaper, running KnightOS.

[1] [http://knightos.org](http://knightos.org)

~~~
mcphage
So, say you accomplish that. You create a calculator that you can sell for
(let's say) $40, that blows the TI-84 out of the water. I believe in you, I
think you could do that.

And say you're successful, and get some traction against the network effects
discussed in the article. You start to threaten TI's money printer.

What do you suppose that TI will do? They charge $140 for the calculators, but
_because they can, not because they have to_. So what will you do when they
drop their price to $30? Or $20? Because they can, and that's why nobody
bothers making any big moves in the market. It looks like TI would be easy to
undercut on cost, but trust me—no matter how cheaply you can make your
calculator, they can make their cheaper.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I know. I've heard this speech before. I can't compete on price at that point,
but then I've won anyway - TI is no longer gouging the market. I don't think
that they'd immediately shift, either, which gives me time to establish a
foothold and keep the market competitive.

~~~
mcphage
I mean, I'm all for that. If you can get them to drop their prices, you'd be a
hero to a huge swath of the country. People could all donate 1% of the money
you save them, and we could easily build a giant gold statue of you :-) So go
for it, and I'll cheer you on :-) As I've said elsewhere, I really hate TI as
a company.

(I did the math after posting that... a life sized solid gold statue of a
human would cost about $47 million, so if you save $100 per person, for 47
million people—that seems doable).

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wodenokoto
Everybody says that this is because of their country niceties to the American
school board association or whatever it is called.

If that's the reason, why is it used in the rest of the world?i had to get one
too for high school in Denmark.

~~~
throwaway7767
> i had to get one too for high school in Denmark.

Was it a requirement, or was it just that the teacher recommended it because
it's what he knew?

In my experience in a European school, the teachers generally recommend a
specific model they're familiar with (usually casio, with some preferring TI)
so they can answer questions easier. But I had no problems buying and using a
different one (HP Prime) for the classes.

~~~
koyote
WFIW, in Luxembourg a TI V200 is required as part of the final secondary
school exam for maths and economics. The V200 being one of the most expensive
models.

Why that specific model was chosen, I am not sure, but I guess that for exams
they want to have something standardised in order to avoid people cheating
(all calculators are reset at the start of exam) or being at an
advantage/disadvantage due to different feature-sets on different models.

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kw71
In 1993 I bought an HP48 for high school trig and calc. The TI-81 was pretty
pathetic, and I think it didn't do calculus. The other HP user in my school
didn't know the difference and probably didn't care - her engineer dad bought
her a 48. Neither of us had any problems keeping up. While our textbooks
didn't feature the TI, the instructors did, with a special version that was
usable with an overhead projector.

I still have my HP48 on my desk and use it every day. I wonder how many of the
other kids even care about the devices they had in high school.

~~~
jacobolus
I used a Casio FX250 scientific calculator, which I purchased for about $5 on
sale in 1998, all the way from middle school through college, including not
only high school calculus class, but also a large number of college math,
science, computer science, economics, etc. courses.

For anything it couldn’t handle, a PC running Maple or Python was a much
better tool than any pocket graphing calculator could ever hope to be.

Insisting students (or their parents) shell our $100 for graphing calculators
is a scam, and spending class time teaching students to punch formulae into TI
calculators is an immense distraction from learning mathematics.

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rtkwe
A lot of the options kicked around are tablets running some app. Most suffer
from some combination of these problems:

1) Unproven and unfamiliar software: the TI calculator OS just works, no
crashes or bugs to really speak of especially in the simpler 83/84 models.
(Though there are some in the 89 where you start to get into symbolic solvers
and dealing with infinities.) Teachers and resource makers have also had a lot
of time to create and learn materials for the older calculators.

2) Power: Calculators really sip power compared to any modern touch screen
devices and with AAA batteries as the power your just a few seconds to go from
a dead calculator (assuming you didn't bother to replace the batteries in the
multiple days that the warning kept popping up) to a working device again.
They also last much longer than any tablet out there and the batteries don't
degrade in performance over time.

3) Physical interfaces vs touchscreen: There's a lot to be said for physical
interfaces in speed and accuracy and the feedback they give. I've found them
faster & more accurate in a lot of cases.

4) Admin overhead: This falls a bit under the unproven part of (1) but is a
bit broader. Locking the tablets down and making sure that they're running
just the base software and cannot communicate during tests is massively harder
with a tablet alternative. Graphic calculators can be reset to factory default
in well under a minute and it's difficult to put much in there beyond simple
plug and solve programs to begin with. Plus free isolation because (generally,
newer models like the NSpire are an exception) they can't communicate
wirelessly to begin with.

None of these are necessarily show stoppers in and of themselves but they're a
pretty high ramp for any competitor to top.

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todd8
I've never found much use for calculators. The first time through my college
science and engineering classes, useful calculators didn't exist (we all used
slide rules). Now, I've almost always got a laptop with me when I have work to
do so the python REPL is just a few keystrokes away, and for tallying a sum of
a few numbers my phone apps work great.

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russdill
The worst part of working at Texas Instruments is people assuming that you
have something to do with the "calculators".

------
6581
_Worse, the calculator is starting to show its age. "Perpendicular lines don't
look perpendicular because the window is a rectangle," one Texas-based math
teacher told Mic._

...what? If this isn't a misquote, I'm wondering whether it was really a math
teacher they talked to.

~~~
jsnell
It's not a completely unreasonable thing to say, at most it's phrased a bit
sloppily. As far as I remember, when you set up the graph there's nothing
guiding the user to use limits for the graph that result in a proper 1:1
aspect ratio. Instead if you e.g. want a graph from -3:3 on the X axis, you
probably also set up the Y axis as -3:3 too. Since the real screen isn't 1:1,
this will result in the graph being squashed down.

And except for the special case of lines that are parallel with the screen
edges, a stretched or squashed aspect ratio would indeed distort the angles
such that you can't tell which angles are perpendicular and which ones aren't.

~~~
xlm1717
In the TI-83, the graph does have several shortcuts you can use to fit the
graph, one of them giving you a 1:1 aspect ratio and showing perpendicular
lines as actually perpendicular.

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ousta
the texas instrument is also a great tool to start programming (TI Basic and
then assembly), start understanding basic concepts of what a computer can do,
it is a gateway to a whole new fascinating world and i'm pretty sure that it
is due to the limitation of the machine that many will want to program.
sometimes old is better.

~~~
lawlessone
"sometimes old is better."

Still costs 100 dollars though.

~~~
ousta
id rather buy a 100 dollar ti than a 700 dollar NSApple iphone

~~~
lawlessone
This isn't binary though,there are various choices. So i guess you're posting
to hacker-news from your TI calculator running tails OS?

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fourier
From what I heard from TI employees they don't get much profits from
calculators; they produce produce them to maintain brand recognizability.

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jkot
Obligatory xkcd

[https://xkcd.com/768/](https://xkcd.com/768/)

~~~
Houshalter
I don't get that. The TI nspire is way improved from older calculators. It has
a color higher resolution screen and a ton of functions and apps.

Unfortunately they removed the BASIC scripting. And there are a lot of
features removed from it to keep it approved on standardized tests, like the
ability to automatically solve equations and a QWERTY keyboard. But it's
really good at graphing things and I loved it when I was in school.

~~~
wtallis
At the time that comic was written, the TI nspire was only a few years old,
didn't have a color screen yet, and was way more than $110 (still is, btw). It
had almost no presence in the market because it wasn't yet being adopted
wholesale the way the TI-83 family was.

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misnome
As a comment on the site, I accidentally scrolled "past" the end of the story
(e.g. hit some arbitrary marker whilst still reading and scrolling) and was
presented by a full screen popup advert saying "Since you enjoyed reading
this....".

That's a new one on me, and super annoying.

~~~
pwg
I'm running NoScript, and I scrolled all the way to the bottom, read the whole
article, and was not interrupted once with any popup adverts. Maybe install
NoScript?

~~~
misnome
I tried a global script killer a few years ago and it made the web unusable,
with having to "turn on" scripts on almost every site I used in order to do
the most basic things.

It's also worth mentioning that I have both Ghostery and Adblock installed,
and running, and this still came up.

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randyrand
Government run orgs and monopolies go hand in hand very often. Im not sure
why.

