3 ms·

OT: TI-83 should cost < $20 by now, based on costs of materials and that the r&d has been paid off for years.

by gkop 11y ago

thaumasiotes 11y ago
Huh? The R&D was paid off as soon as it completed. Money from completed projects funds R&D in the present; it doesn't retroactively fund R&D in the past.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Yes,R&D is technically paid off as soon as it completes, but paying off the R&D is an investment and the company obviously wants a return on this investment.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    But the price of a calculator is totally unrelated to the cost of the R&D associated with the calculator. The original point was nonsense. The company wants its return to be as large as possible. Speaking in more sensible terms, they want to get as much money as they can regardless of whether they've reached a magic internal accounting threshold or not. R&D just has no relevance at all to product pricing.
dogma1138 11y ago
It's not like TI is selling exactly the same TI-83 now, and it seems that most of their R&D effort and value comes from software. You can easily duplicate the hardware these days, or even do everything in software but it seems that high quality CAS software is pretty hard to make. TI and Mathlab pretty much got a monopoly on that as it seems I haven't seen a single off-brand graphical calculator that actually worked. Not even sure if anyone besides TI and to lesser extent HP are even making graphical calculators these days (HP ones are (or at least were) substantially more expensive. So when you have a market monopoly and a product with very little obsolescence (graphical calculators can easily last 10-15 years these days) there's nothing to drive the market down. The TI-8X series is also one of the few "certified" ones and they also have localized versions that disable certain features for countries that limit the use of "smart calculators" but don't ban them outright.

OT: TI-83 should cost < $20 by now, based on costs of materials and that the r&d has been paid off for years.

by gkop 11y ago

OT: TI-83 should cost < $20 by now, based on costs of materials and that the r&d has been paid off for years.

Huh? The R&D was paid off as soon as it completed. Money from completed projects funds R&D in the present; it doesn't retroactively fund R&D in the past.

semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Yes,R&D is technically paid off as soon as it completes, but paying off the R&D is an investment and the company obviously wants a return on this investment.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  But the price of a calculator is totally unrelated to the cost of the R&D associated with the calculator. The original point was nonsense. The company wants its return to be as large as possible. Speaking in more sensible terms, they want to get as much money as they can regardless of whether they've reached a magic internal accounting threshold or not. R&D just has no relevance at all to product pricing.

dogma1138 11y ago

It's not like TI is selling exactly the same TI-83 now, and it seems that most of their R&D effort and value comes from software. You can easily duplicate the hardware these days, or even do everything in software but it seems that high quality CAS software is pretty hard to make. TI and Mathlab pretty much got a monopoly on that as it seems I haven't seen a single off-brand graphical calculator that actually worked. Not even sure if anyone besides TI and to lesser extent HP are even making graphical calculators these days (HP ones are (or at least were) substantially more expensive. So when you have a market monopoly and a product with very little obsolescence (graphical calculators can easily last 10-15 years these days) there's nothing to drive the market down. The TI-8X series is also one of the few "certified" ones and they also have localized versions that disable certain features for countries that limit the use of "smart calculators" but don't ban them outright.