8 ms·

Why Graphing Calculators Still Cost So Much

56 points by creamyhorror 11y ago

randyrand 11y ago
Government run orgs and monopolies go hand in hand very often. Im not sure why.
6581 11y ago
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.
- exDM69 11y ago
  Yeah, that is certainly incorrect. Not only are perpendicular lines perpendicular regardless of the display aspect ratio (edit: as long as you set the projection axes correctly), you can adjust the displayed range in the TI. And the pixels in the display are square shaped (unlike e.g. Commodore 64 in some modes), so there's no distortion from that either.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    I'm not sure what you think the display aspect ratio means, but a 2:1 aspect ratio means that the horizontal axis of a graph will get scaled by a factor of 2 if the window is displaying a square section of space. The lines y = x and y = -x are perpendicular. 2:1 scaling means the line y = x will appear on screen as y = 0.5x . A line perpendicular to that would have slope -2. But the line y = -x, which is actually perpendicular to y = x, will instead appear on screen as y = -0.5x .
    - exDM69 11y ago
      > that the horizontal axis of a graph will get scaled by a factor of 2 if the window is displaying a square section of space. Yes, exactly. But you can adjust the axes of the graph to get an 1:1 display (ie. x is -10..10 and y is -5..5, not a square space). And that is the default in the TI graphs IIRC. So as long as you set up the projection to match the screen resolution aspect ratio, you'll get perpendicular lines correctly.
      - vardump 11y ago
        At least on TI-85, I think the pixels are slightly taller than wide, by about 20%. Not square shaped. I'd assume same is true for other TI-8x calculators.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        As discussed in the other comments, the default window is -10..10 and -10..10 in 3:2 aspect ratio.
- russdill 11y ago
  The must be talking about curved lines that intersect at a perpendicular angle. I think that might make sense.
  - russdill 11y ago
    Actually now that I think about it, two straight lines, one at 45° and one at 135° would display this problem assuming that the display is not displaying the lines at the correct aspect ratio.
- bonobo3000 11y ago
  I think its possible with perpendicular lines that arent axis-aligned. An m=1 line on a 4:3 aspect ratio will look like an m=0.75 line.
- TorKlingberg 11y ago
  I think by default it plots from -10 to 10 on both axis. So if you plot y=x and y=-x together they will not look perpendicular on the rectangular screen. You can of course adjust the axes, but if I remember right it's not obvious how to make them match the screen. Graphing tools on a computer or smartphone probably have better default settings.
  - simcop2387 11y ago
    In the zoom menu there's an option ZSquare (or such) that'll correct the limits to make it fit the aspect ratio.
- jsnell 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
- tschuy 11y ago
  The default range for graphs is (-10,10) in both dimensions, while the screen has a 3:2 aspect ratio. The default makes perpendicular lines that aren't on the axes stretched horizontally and appear to be at non right angles.
exDM69 11y ago
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 11y ago
  hp-48gx emulator?
  - kayfox 11y ago
    Or just an HP-48GX
  - tonyarkles 11y ago
    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.
jkot 11y ago
Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/
- Houshalter 11y ago
  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.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - wtallis 11y ago
    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.
  - Zolomon 11y ago
    I have a TI-nspire cx, it has support for Lua scripting instead! It even has a physics engine inside so you can write quite complicated games even.
russdill 11y ago
The worst part of working at Texas Instruments is people assuming that you have something to do with the "calculators".
blazespin 11y ago
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.
todd8 11y ago
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.
misnome 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
- noarchy 11y ago
  Surprises like that have become increasingly common in this "endless scrolling" era.
- aembleton 11y ago
  I didn't see it, but I have added Fanboy’s Annoyance List‎ to uBlock: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/fanboy-annoyance.txt https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/fanboy-annoyance....
kw71 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
wodenokoto 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    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.
  - wodenokoto 11y ago
    I guess you are allowed to participate in class without, in a similar way to how you are allowed to participate in class without the textbook. When they say you "need" one I. The us, is that literally "need" one as in you'll get kicked out if you show up without?
- q3k 11y ago
  In Poland, you're supposed to only use 4-function calculators both at local and national exams - to the point that I was accused of cheating by using my graphing calculator (and, in hindsight, it was cheating).
- makomk 11y ago
ousta 11y ago
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.
- ojii 11y ago
  I wrote my first "game" on a TI-83. Tictactoe. With an unbeatable "AI" (hardcoded if/else lookups for every possible move. the only "intelligent" thing about it was that it could "rotate" the board to minimize the lookups). Then I downloaded some games from the internet and simply gave up on my TI-83 game dev dreams because I saw no way to compete with these "3d" games that are out there... Still a fun little experience.
- lawlessone 11y ago
  "sometimes old is better." Still costs 100 dollars though.
  - ousta 11y ago
    id rather buy a 100 dollar ti than a 700 dollar NSApple iphone
    - lawlessone 11y ago
      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?
    - mcphage 11y ago
      How about a $50 Amazon tablet? That will have hardware that blows any of TI's calculators out of the water.
theintern 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - dspillett 11y ago
    > but how come graphing calculators haven't advanced at all. They don't really need to so there is little commercial reason to develop better models. The old TI-81/TI-83 designs are still perfectly sufficient for the courses to a certainly level, and above that you need something much more than just a bit improved so you can run chunky software like matlab. There isn't really much of an exploitable niche in between.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - electroly 11y ago
    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-calculators https://education.ti.com/en/us/products#!product=graphing-ca... 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.
Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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).
dkbrk 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    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?
fourier 11y ago
From what I heard from TI employees they don't get much profits from calculators; they produce produce them to maintain brand recognizability.
rtkwe 11y ago
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.

56 points by creamyhorror 11y ago

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

6581 11y ago

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.

exDM69 11y ago
Yeah, that is certainly incorrect. Not only are perpendicular lines perpendicular regardless of the display aspect ratio (edit: as long as you set the projection axes correctly), you can adjust the displayed range in the TI. And the pixels in the display are square shaped (unlike e.g. Commodore 64 in some modes), so there's no distortion from that either.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  I'm not sure what you think the display aspect ratio means, but a 2:1 aspect ratio means that the horizontal axis of a graph will get scaled by a factor of 2 if the window is displaying a square section of space. The lines y = x and y = -x are perpendicular. 2:1 scaling means the line y = x will appear on screen as y = 0.5x . A line perpendicular to that would have slope -2. But the line y = -x, which is actually perpendicular to y = x, will instead appear on screen as y = -0.5x .
  - exDM69 11y ago
    > that the horizontal axis of a graph will get scaled by a factor of 2 if the window is displaying a square section of space. Yes, exactly. But you can adjust the axes of the graph to get an 1:1 display (ie. x is -10..10 and y is -5..5, not a square space). And that is the default in the TI graphs IIRC. So as long as you set up the projection to match the screen resolution aspect ratio, you'll get perpendicular lines correctly.
    - vardump 11y ago
      At least on TI-85, I think the pixels are slightly taller than wide, by about 20%. Not square shaped. I'd assume same is true for other TI-8x calculators.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      As discussed in the other comments, the default window is -10..10 and -10..10 in 3:2 aspect ratio.
russdill 11y ago
The must be talking about curved lines that intersect at a perpendicular angle. I think that might make sense.
- russdill 11y ago
  Actually now that I think about it, two straight lines, one at 45° and one at 135° would display this problem assuming that the display is not displaying the lines at the correct aspect ratio.
bonobo3000 11y ago
I think its possible with perpendicular lines that arent axis-aligned. An m=1 line on a 4:3 aspect ratio will look like an m=0.75 line.
TorKlingberg 11y ago
I think by default it plots from -10 to 10 on both axis. So if you plot y=x and y=-x together they will not look perpendicular on the rectangular screen. You can of course adjust the axes, but if I remember right it's not obvious how to make them match the screen. Graphing tools on a computer or smartphone probably have better default settings.
- simcop2387 11y ago
  In the zoom menu there's an option ZSquare (or such) that'll correct the limits to make it fit the aspect ratio.
jsnell 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
tschuy 11y ago
The default range for graphs is (-10,10) in both dimensions, while the screen has a 3:2 aspect ratio. The default makes perpendicular lines that aren't on the axes stretched horizontally and appear to be at non right angles.

exDM69 11y ago

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 11y ago
hp-48gx emulator?
- kayfox 11y ago
  Or just an HP-48GX
- tonyarkles 11y ago
  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.

jkot 11y ago

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/

Houshalter 11y ago
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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- wtallis 11y ago
  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.
- Zolomon 11y ago
  I have a TI-nspire cx, it has support for Lua scripting instead! It even has a physics engine inside so you can write quite complicated games even.

russdill 11y ago

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

blazespin 11y ago

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.

todd8 11y ago

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.

misnome 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
noarchy 11y ago
Surprises like that have become increasingly common in this "endless scrolling" era.
aembleton 11y ago
I didn't see it, but I have added Fanboy’s Annoyance List‎ to uBlock: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/fanboy-annoyance.txt https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/fanboy-annoyance....

kw71 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

wodenokoto 11y ago

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 11y ago
> 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 11y ago
  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.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  I guess you are allowed to participate in class without, in a similar way to how you are allowed to participate in class without the textbook. When they say you "need" one I. The us, is that literally "need" one as in you'll get kicked out if you show up without?
q3k 11y ago
In Poland, you're supposed to only use 4-function calculators both at local and national exams - to the point that I was accused of cheating by using my graphing calculator (and, in hindsight, it was cheating).
makomk 11y ago

ousta 11y ago

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.

ojii 11y ago
I wrote my first "game" on a TI-83. Tictactoe. With an unbeatable "AI" (hardcoded if/else lookups for every possible move. the only "intelligent" thing about it was that it could "rotate" the board to minimize the lookups). Then I downloaded some games from the internet and simply gave up on my TI-83 game dev dreams because I saw no way to compete with these "3d" games that are out there... Still a fun little experience.
lawlessone 11y ago
"sometimes old is better." Still costs 100 dollars though.
- ousta 11y ago
  id rather buy a 100 dollar ti than a 700 dollar NSApple iphone
  - lawlessone 11y ago
    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?
  - mcphage 11y ago
    How about a $50 Amazon tablet? That will have hardware that blows any of TI's calculators out of the water.

theintern 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- dspillett 11y ago
  > but how come graphing calculators haven't advanced at all. They don't really need to so there is little commercial reason to develop better models. The old TI-81/TI-83 designs are still perfectly sufficient for the courses to a certainly level, and above that you need something much more than just a bit improved so you can run chunky software like matlab. There isn't really much of an exploitable niche in between.
- deleted 11y ago
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- electroly 11y ago
  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-calculators https://education.ti.com/en/us/products#!product=graphing-ca... 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.

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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).

dkbrk 11y ago

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 11y ago
> 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 11y ago
  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?

fourier 11y ago

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

rtkwe 11y ago

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.