No, it's not. I love Desmos. It's a great tool for the classroom. I use it whenever I can. It's also not a replacement for a handheld calculator. If the inter

No, it's not. I love Desmos. It's a great tool for the classroom. I use it whenever I can. It's also not a replacement for a handheld calculator. If the internet goes out, you lose your calculator. If it is working, then you're policing students to make sure that they're using their device for calculation. If it is working and you have the best students in the world or a locked-down network, it's still slower, less precise, and more annoying to use a calculator with virtual buttons than a handheld calculator with physical buttons. Because of the nature of classroom instruction, there was almost always going to be at least local monopolies on calculators. If you're reading HN, you probably didn't struggle to figure out a graphing calculator. Many students do. Part of a lesson is often teaching students how to use a calculator, and it is far easier to only give a single set of instructions. Regardless of how well you have the other students working independently and how well the teacher knows all three+ calculator brands, the most valuable resource in a class is teacher time and attention. If a teacher spends 15 minutes explaining how to use a calculator instead of 5, that's 10 minutes of class time that students don't have access to the teacher to learn math. That adds up quickly. As a result, most schools decide, independently of any marketing, to standardize on a single calculator. As the article notes, TI got to where it is because it spent a lot of money supporting teachers for free. Momentum took it from there. On top of all that, the other thing a lot of people overlook re: the TI-84 family (and other handheld calculators) is how fast it is. Not the processor, but the speed at which it gets you an answer. It powers on and is instantly ready to go. You don't get that with any computer solution. Shared devices have to be logged into. Browsers have to open. Web apps have to load. TI also has a new classroom calculator with an ARM processor and a bunch of other features, the NSpire. It's sold at about the same price points as an 84. Most teachers I talked to found it infuriating: you hit the power button, and you have to wait a few seconds for it to boot. Then when it does, it loads a menu screen where you can choose if you want to do calculations or something else. The old hardware just worked: you hit on, and before you can touch another key, it's ready to go.