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Not to give my age away, but I grew-up with a Ti-83, and I prefer it to any HP calculator I’ve tried. It’s possible that HP saw that entire cohorts of kids were

Not to give my age away, but I grew-up with a Ti-83, and I prefer it to any HP calculator I’ve tried. It’s possible that HP saw that entire cohorts of kids were growing up exposed only to Ti and Casio calculators with their own proprietary ways-of-doing-things - and commoditisation in general - and HP didn’t have a way to lock-in consumers the way that Apple did with ITMS when MP3 player competition peaked.

linguae 6y ago
I also grew up with a TI-83, though in college I learned about HP calculators and RPN and ended up buying a HP-48S on eBay; those were the cheapest non-financial HP calculators I could find on eBay at the time. I love RPN, but I liked my TI-83's ease of use. Another factor that could have led to the demise of HP calculators was Texas Instruments' partnerships with textbook companies. When I was in high school, many textbooks had TI-83 examples and exercises. My impression is that HP's calculators were marketed to college students and engineers, while TI marketed its calculators to the much more lucrative middle and high school market. Thus turned out to be a winning strategy for Texas Instruments. As a computer scientist/software engineer, I seldom use handheld calculators anymore. I use the Unix dc command whenever I need to make quick calculations, and I have LibreOffice Calc, GNU Octane, and REPLs available (such as Python and Common Lisp) whenever I need to perform more complex calculations. If I must calculate something away from my computer, I can use my iPhone's calculator app. I would imagine that this killed the traditional market for HP calculators; why spend the money on a bespoke handheld calculator when most engineers have access to computers and smartphones? However, in a classroom setting I wouldn't be allowed to use my iPhone. Texas Instruments did a good job courting the classroom and standardized test markets. HP might have figured that it didn't want to compete against TI in this market. With that being said, I wish I didn't miss out on the HP-15c special edition that was on sale briefly in 2011; I didn't hear any announcements until it was already sold out.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  I agree that it's hard to see how anyone gets $500 worth out of the HP-50G. I use i48, the HP-48 simulator for iOS. The only thing it lacks is that keyboard feel. When I was in high school virtually everyone had a TI calculator but I couldn't afford one. At college we were required to own an HP-48. I don't recall paying $500 for it, but maybe I did and I just forgot. It doesn't seem like the kind of money I would have had at that time. I still have it and it still works perfectly, which puts it in league with my Tektronix analog oscilloscopes in terms of legendary durability.
cbm-vic-20 6y ago
Not to give my age away either, but in high school, for the rare classes that needed them, all we needed was a generic scientific calculator that included logarithmic and trigonometry functions. In engineering school, the HP-28, -42 and the new -48 series calculators where dominant. The build quality and "feel" were great. I don't even know if there was an equivalent TI model at the time.

linguae 6y ago

I also grew up with a TI-83, though in college I learned about HP calculators and RPN and ended up buying a HP-48S on eBay; those were the cheapest non-financial HP calculators I could find on eBay at the time. I love RPN, but I liked my TI-83's ease of use. Another factor that could have led to the demise of HP calculators was Texas Instruments' partnerships with textbook companies. When I was in high school, many textbooks had TI-83 examples and exercises. My impression is that HP's calculators were marketed to college students and engineers, while TI marketed its calculators to the much more lucrative middle and high school market. Thus turned out to be a winning strategy for Texas Instruments. As a computer scientist/software engineer, I seldom use handheld calculators anymore. I use the Unix dc command whenever I need to make quick calculations, and I have LibreOffice Calc, GNU Octane, and REPLs available (such as Python and Common Lisp) whenever I need to perform more complex calculations. If I must calculate something away from my computer, I can use my iPhone's calculator app. I would imagine that this killed the traditional market for HP calculators; why spend the money on a bespoke handheld calculator when most engineers have access to computers and smartphones? However, in a classroom setting I wouldn't be allowed to use my iPhone. Texas Instruments did a good job courting the classroom and standardized test markets. HP might have figured that it didn't want to compete against TI in this market. With that being said, I wish I didn't miss out on the HP-15c special edition that was on sale briefly in 2011; I didn't hear any announcements until it was already sold out.

jeffbee 6y ago
I agree that it's hard to see how anyone gets $500 worth out of the HP-50G. I use i48, the HP-48 simulator for iOS. The only thing it lacks is that keyboard feel. When I was in high school virtually everyone had a TI calculator but I couldn't afford one. At college we were required to own an HP-48. I don't recall paying $500 for it, but maybe I did and I just forgot. It doesn't seem like the kind of money I would have had at that time. I still have it and it still works perfectly, which puts it in league with my Tektronix analog oscilloscopes in terms of legendary durability.

cbm-vic-20 6y ago

Not to give my age away either, but in high school, for the rare classes that needed them, all we needed was a generic scientific calculator that included logarithmic and trigonometry functions. In engineering school, the HP-28, -42 and the new -48 series calculators where dominant. The build quality and "feel" were great. I don't even know if there was an equivalent TI model at the time.