14 ms·

Ti-84 Evo

603 points by thatxliner 5mo ago

Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
I always thought they should make a thin, metal, foldable 83 variant that just bends in the middle and looks like a cigarette case.
omgJustTest 5mo ago
But when will it run GPT? (:
Yossarrian22 5mo ago
Ti really needs to stop with the artificial product differentiation. There's no reason 15 years after the Nspire CX CAS came out that everyone of their calculators can't do CAS.
- alfalfasprout 5mo ago
  Heck, you could do a decent amount with the CAS back in the TI-89.
  - selectodude 5mo ago
    Decent? I'm not sure the new CAS models do anything that the TI-89 didn't.
  - 15155 5mo ago
    Which is why it was notoriously banned from exams.
  - metadat 5mo ago
    TI-89 is the GOAT!
- NetMageSCW 5mo ago
  The reason is exam requirements - some professional certifications don’t allow CAS calculators and have other restrictions.
- loeg 5mo ago
  It doesn't help students learn if the tool does everything for them. This isn't a tool for professionals.
- JoshTriplett 5mo ago
  Advanced calculators are in an unusual space with external constraints on it. Some of the features or differentiation they add serves the constraint of "if you don't, we won't let students use it in the classroom". When a calculator is used in a classroom, there's a concern about people using the calculator to replace the skill that's being taught. So, for instance, there's space for a calculator with no CAS, for a class that's trying to teach you to do algebra. That is in some ways easier than "don't use this function of the calculator".
  - ndriscoll 5mo ago
    My linear algebra class used F_2 as our field probably half the time that it was specified. Realistically almost any course probably doesn't need calculators at all (or they could at least be kept for homework). If you're not teaching arithmetic, you keep the arithmetic simple. If you're not teaching algebra, you keep the algebra simple. etc.
  - Ekaros 5mo ago
    It is not really classroom. It is more so setting testing standard that matches the standardised testing that schooling aims for. This ofc then extends to testing in classroom tests as that is best way to prepare students. Not that any of this matter anymore as it can be entirely replaced with LLMs in near future.
  - ndiddy 5mo ago
    Yeah there's not really a purpose for advanced calculators anymore (apart from the niche market of people who just enjoy using them). Calculators are basically only a thing now to make it harder to cheat on exams. If you don't have that constraint, you might as well use Wolfram or Matlab or whatever.
    - vkou 5mo ago
      Or, here's a wild idea - exam problems should be structured such that they do not require any advanced calculator. Math problems should not require any calculator. Physics problems should require a scientific calculator. Overcomplicating the arithmetic shouldn't be the point.
- xp84 5mo ago
  I don't think it's been about costs or CPU for at least 20 years, but isn't it more that for kids to learn to do math, it's better not to have CAS always at hand? So that's why there are some in the lineup without it.
- sosborn 5mo ago
  CAS capabilities are prohibited in the SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-do/calculator-policy#:~:text=Calculators%20with%20CAS%20(computer%20algebra,students%20who%20take%20the%20SAT. https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-do/calcu...
  - hatsunearu 5mo ago
    Wow, they used to be allowed back when I was in high school. It came in super clutch for SAT but much more importantly AP. Our school mandated the original CS CAS and drilled us on how to use it effectively and I got good mileage out of it through high school testing and college. I lost it at some point and got the version 2 and I would occasionally use it for work. I wish it had USB-C because who has a mini-B cable for charging these days
    - frostiness 5mo ago
      As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
      - hatsunearu 5mo ago
        Forgot what menu-3-1 is lol, I would use solve() all the time though. Got super good at typing that with my thumbs really fast
    - peesem 5mo ago
      CollegeBoard only seemed to realize recently, the ban on CAS calculators on the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams came last September if I remember correctly, maybe August or October
    - BoorishBears 5mo ago
      I vaguely remember they were banned by a proxy that stopped working after the Ti-89 came out: no QWERTY keyboards Originally that blocked the Ti-92, but then the Ti-89 and Nspire line had numeric keypads + CAS
- dheera 5mo ago
  Honest question: Why do we need physical graphing calculators anymore? Can't this just be a phone app? That screen resolution for one is horrible for 2026.
  - loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
    Mostly for students in settings that may disallow either smartphones or calculators with specific advanced features (schools, SAT exams etc) Also I don’t know about you but these days I welcome stuff that allows me to stay away from the damn phone.
  - 8note 5mo ago
    i moved my ti-89 to be a phone app, but it was much much slower to type on the soft keyboard than it is to press the actual buttons.
  - mkprc 5mo ago
    It's about ensuring "academic honesty" on exams. Also, it's nice to have buttons rather than a touchscreen. Also, there is something to be said about using a device with a different form-factor than the one on which a student also scrolls TikTok/IG and distracts themselves otherwise.
  - akgoel 5mo ago
    You don't. Most academic uses are now replaced by desmos, which is also used on the SAT. It's free, it's fast, and it does most of what you need.
  - saagarjha 5mo ago
    I am pretty sure I could use a TI-89 Titanium in the dark even now
guizzy 5mo ago
> Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction 15 year old me in math class programming my loaned TI-82: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
- IIAOPSW 5mo ago
  Jokes on you, you learned to program.
  - a96 5mo ago
    Didn't let schooling interfere with their education.
aaronbrethorst 5mo ago
$160 at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI84-TI-Calculator/dp/B0G8SFR7DH?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI84-TI-Calculator/... Not as bad as I would've expected. Also, apparently it includes a very simple Python environment? https://education.ti.com/en/product-resources/eguides/eguide-84-evo/python https://education.ti.com/en/product-resources/eguides/eguide...
- retired 5mo ago
  For a $10 BoM and maybe a year of R&D I would say that $160 is bad.
  - aaronbrethorst 5mo ago
    A TI-83 was about $100 in the year 2000, and it doesn't look like it's that much cheaper today. I would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging their very captive market.
    - LeCompteSftware 5mo ago
      But you can't divorce that from computing technology in general. A TI-83 used a z80 in 2000 and was priced at 1990's z80 rates, it was already gouging even back then! Now 26 years later the TI-84 uses an ez80 (or something something similar), which was introduced in 2001. TI has always gouged their captive market. It is just increasingly ridiculous when those students also have smartphones. FWIW I think these graphing calculators are quite good for 2026 students! It is nice to have a computer which is actually comprehensible. They just need to be more like $50. $160 is just evil.
      - aaronbrethorst 5mo ago
        Shrug. The SAT and ACT don't let you use an iPhone on their exams. $160 is what the market will bear. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it just is, and perhaps there's a market for a much cheaper competitor to beat TI here.
eiiot 5mo ago
Interesting that this doesn't seem to include a computer algebra system like the Nspire CAS. Wonder if it's a testing environment compliance thing?
- ezfe 5mo ago
  Absolutely is
mettamage 5mo ago
It runs Python! National exams will be wild for the kids capable of programming or vibe coding.
- retired 5mo ago
  With a 156MHz processor and 3.5 megabytes of user-available memory the kids will even learn how to optimize their code!
JoshTriplett 5mo ago
> Not just an upgrade — an EVOlution Oh no.
- girvo 5mo ago
  You’re absolutely right! …LLM-isms are like nails on chalkboard I swear. Instant turn off the moment I read them. Even if they’re maybe not lol, doesn’t matter my visceral reaction is negative.
  - Apocryphon 5mo ago
    That's just what standard marketing copy sounds like. ...which perhaps says a lot about the corpora that the models are trained on.
- smlacy 5mo ago
  156 MHz!!!!
  - billforsternz 5mo ago
    Surprisingly high or surprisingly low?
    - smlacy 5mo ago
      IMHO surprisingly low. Still not clear to me why they don't just port these things to ARM or similar?
      - billforsternz 5mo ago
        Thanks for clarifying. I think this is an ARM and a break from a history of Z80 and Z80 adjacent CPUs. I do get the impression TI have done a good (financial) job milking these products whilst under investing in real product innovation.
      - samtheDamned 5mo ago
moffkalast 5mo ago
Genuine question, who uses these in practice? In my experience, calculators beyond the basic were always banned in high school and college, cause everyone's so afraid people might store something into them, and afterwards it's just matlab and python. It's not like laptops aren't a thing that everyone has on hand.
- NetMageSCW 5mo ago
  You may have gone to a poor high school and college. I saw plenty of calculator use in high school and college a long time ago.
  - moffkalast 5mo ago
    Sure calculators were allowed in some cases, the "scientific" kind, not the graphing kind. But yes I would agree. So much time spent making sure people don't learn to use the tools they'll always have on hand. Programming exams on paper and that kind of inane bullshit.
    - darthwalsh 5mo ago
      In my USA high School, they started requiring graphing calculators in the 9th grade math class. You would fail most quizzes/exams without the ability to run the calculations that scientific calculators couldn't do. I'm struggling to remember using my TI-84 in college though.
  - Toutouxc 5mo ago
    Poor? In what sense? I graduated a few years ago (in Europe) and I think I could’ve gone through my entire education without owning one. Math, for me, went from nice numbers to ugly numbers that you had to do by hand (because that was the point), then to just letters and squiggles. At no point was there a need to work with hard numbers or to learn to work with a physical calculator (I haven’t seen one in the wild in years).
- pclowes 5mo ago
  IIRC You don’t use them in the dumb kids class much, you use them a fair amount in the sort of smart class, and you don’t use them much in the actually smart class.
LeoPanthera 5mo ago
What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations? Or are we all just using software on our computers now. That would be sad. (I've had a Casio fx-991EX on my desk for a few years, that replaced a broken Casio fx-991ES. Though designed for academia, its operation is burned into my brain at this point.)
- JoshTriplett 5mo ago
  > What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations? I still have my TI-85, but I essentially haven't used it since I left college. For 99% of what I need, I use either Python, or what's built into Firefox (e.g. unit conversion), or DDG. For that last 1% (e.g. full CAS functionality), I tend to grab whatever web-based non-AI tool is handy.
  - ezfe 5mo ago
    Web based AI tools are remarkably helpful these days since they no longer try to do math themselves and instead write python to do it.
- wtallis 5mo ago
  I use emu48 on my phone emulating the HP-50g, which was almost exactly the same size as the phone so my muscle memory somewhat carries over (minus the tactile feedback of a real keyboard). I still have the physical calculator on my desk at home, with no batteries in it so it's only usable within reach of its USB cable. Anything that goes beyond what that calculator's UI can reasonably handle is going to end up in a Jupyter notebook or something like that.
  - drivers99 5mo ago
    Similarly, I still have my HP-42s but I usually use Free42[0] on my phone and tablet. They also have it for desktops. It's great if you like RPN calculators. Or if anyone wants to learn about them, you can use that program and follow along with the original manual(s)[1]. It's nice to be able to handle the order of operations without parentheses. [0] https://thomasokken.com/free42/ https://thomasokken.com/free42/ I should send them a donation. [1] https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-om-en.pdf https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-om-en.pdf followed by https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-prog-en.pdf https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-prog-en.pdf
wyre 5mo ago
It has Python? That's pretty cool.
- petra303 5mo ago
  It doesn’t have a qwerty keyboard. That would be such a pain to type on. For some reason qwerty keyboard calculators are banned in tests.
  - Ekaros 5mo ago
    I think those were aimed at different market segments. And that would be engineers, professionals and working academics that is not students. Generally limitations in education on what was allowed led to more limited feature sets. Where as full feature set that could be upsold with qwerty keyboard was aimed for different users.
cyanureworld 5mo ago
There's the NumWorks which is very similar for a more reasonable price, that also run Python
- Jyaif 5mo ago
  And you can tell that TI pretty clearly copied the NumWorks calculator.
- mikehotel 5mo ago
  Numworks is so much better. According to kids that have access to Ti and HP graphing calculators. The hardware and software design similarities between this Evo and Numworks is a strong endorsement.
pclowes 5mo ago
75” 4k OLED screens would have been unobtainable when I first used a TI. 10yrs ago they would have been 4 to 5 figures. Now they are what? A couple hundred? How in the world is a TI graphing calculator still $160? These 30yr old calculator chips apparently hold their value like gold…
- MattDamonSpace 5mo ago
  It’s got a 3x faster processor brah
  - pclowes 5mo ago
    Good point, my understanding of a cubic function in 02 was totally stunted by the processor speed…
- FarmerPotato 5mo ago
  Wow, no comment yet for https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/
josh2600 5mo ago
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Yeri 5mo ago
What's the "online calculator license" ? "Online calculator included (four-year subscription) •($80 value)"
- cristoperb 5mo ago
  Apparently just a TI-84 Evo emulator(?) that you can run in a browser for $20/year: https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-calculators/ti-84-evo/ti-84-evo-online-calculator https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...
- tech234a 5mo ago
  My guess is that they are trying to encourage people not to use the various clones and unofficial emulators available for their calculators.
lvl155 5mo ago
Biggest ripoff in academics. There should be a cheap open source calculators for schools and exams. It’s ridiculous that TI is still charging this.
- bloodyplonker22 5mo ago
  The biggest ripoffs were the textbooks. Especially the textbooks written by the teachers, themselves, who forced you to buy them.
vvpan 5mo ago
We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
- pavel_lishin 5mo ago
  I certainly got a lot of educational value out of mine. I managed to program a fully functional Minesweeper game on mine, using the built-in programming tools - no transferring efficient binaries via cable! But yes. 99% of what we did with them in class - when we were even allowed to use them - could have been handled by a little solar-powered calculator with basic arithmetic functions.
  - joebates 5mo ago
    Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.
    - w0m 5mo ago
      same. My first real exposure to coding was hacking Drug Wars on my brothers old ti-89 in math class.
    - mrguyorama 5mo ago
      Same. I bounced off a python 2 tutorial and a C tutorial, but some random nobody's TI-BASIC tutorial that started really damn easy is how I became a Computer Scientist. I eventually figured out python too! I made my own game and got a little notoriety around the school for it.
    - beeandapenguin 5mo ago
      Same for me, it was also my first time ever seeing code, and I still remember it well. While getting ready for swim practice in a locker room, my friend challenged me to beat his score on a button mashing game he programmed earlier that day in school on his TI-84. My 12 year old self was in awe of his BASIC skills.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
palmotea 5mo ago
> Simplified keypad > The keypad layout removes clutter and makes commands and shortcuts easier to see, so you can work faster with fewer steps. I don't see it. I compared a screenshot of one of these to a older T-84, and it looks like they have same number of buttons, and the buttons are just as cluttered (except the EVO has secondary labels on the keycaps instead of the case). That's a good thing, since one of the best things about calculators is they typically have a ton of buttons for quick access to a lot of functions.
- nxobject 5mo ago
  On my favorite designs ever? The first TI-Nspire "battleship" keyboard. Mini alpha-symbol keys in the corners of actual keys. It looked so annoying, but my muscle memory got very good at it. https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-DOR2014-05202&max=600 https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-DOR2014-05202...
esafak 5mo ago
It's a shame that maths in American schools is equated with calculation. All you need to be a mathematician is a calculator!
- jasonmp85 5mo ago
  [dead]
wslh 5mo ago
Looking at the price of this and other calculators, I wonder if there's a market for "dumb calculators" analogous to dumb terminals: a device with the calculator form factor, keyboard, and display, but where the actual computation happens on a paired computer/phone or a cloud endpoint over WiFi/Bluetooth.
- Willish42 5mo ago
  The cost of these devices isn't the computation, and if anything more connectivity would probably make these more expensive and harder to use (many "smart" devices in classrooms have networking issues and if even one of them can't connect, it hurts the ability to run a lesson). I think standalone computation abilities are pretty important, and connectivity can be a downside for preventing cheating in standardized exams etc.
kristopolous 5mo ago
Show me a highschool math problem you can't do on a $12 Casio scientific like the classic FX-300MS https://www.usaofficemachines.com/csofx300ms-fx-300ms-scientific-calculator-10-digit-lcd-by-casio-inc.html https://www.usaofficemachines.com/csofx300ms-fx-300ms-scient... There's even knockoffs of it for $1: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809744184708.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809744184708.html I picked one up when the 99 cent store was shutting down. It works fine. Look what you can get for $20: https://www.casio.com/intl/scientific-calculators/product.FX-350CW/ https://www.casio.com/intl/scientific-calculators/product.FX... TI is like the Intuit of the education world. I want to love them but this is ridiculous - a N4120 celeron laptop is the same price as this new calculator - it might be a garbage laptop but it's doing a heck of a lot more for your $160 than this calculator is.
- rogerrogerr 5mo ago
  The contrived ones where they make you graph stuff, but that’s about it.
  - vkou 5mo ago
    There is no graphing problem that you'll be asked to solve before university that can't be plotted to a 'good enough for high school' level by hand in seconds. Four data points is sufficient to give you a 'good enough' shape and position of a second-degree polynomial. Five or six for a third-degree one. (And you barely see them, and don't learn how to algebraically solve for their roots in high school anyways, because the cubic factoring formula is a pig.) If you can't tell what a function's plotted shape is going to be at a glance, you haven't learned the material to the degree expected of an attentive child.
    - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
      This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator. Besides, it is expected that a student can use a graphing calculator to be able to numerically solve for a root of arbitrary polynomial equation.
chaqchase 5mo ago
Nice to see the hardware move forward. I still wish calculators were more open, or at least less locked into school-age pricing.
nxobject 5mo ago
And those goddamn displays still have the pixel density of a Tamagotchi.
BewareTheYiga 5mo ago
You will have to pry my TI-89 from my cold dead hands. I wish they still made it
Mathochist 5mo ago
Those who have used various classic HP calculators in the past may be interested in this: https://www.swissmicros.com/products https://www.swissmicros.com/products These are clones of various older calculators.
- kstrauser 5mo ago
  I bought a DM42n last year. I didn't need it. I don't use it so often that I can justify its purchase. Still, wow, I do so enjoy working with it. It's one of those tools that just feels good to use.
  - SirHumphrey 5mo ago
    There is a certain joy in working with RPN and in using a piece of technology that was designed as a tool, not as a toy or an educational appliance. With phone emulation, I probably need half a calculator. I have three.
    - kstrauser 5mo ago
      That's so true. It's custom-built to do exactly one thing, as efficiently and ergonomically as possible. I love any tool like that.
Ekaros 5mo ago
156MHz and 3,5MB user memory... Why do I feel like that is a joke these days.. I think some ESP32s are faster and have more memory, but not sure if they are fully comparable...
- a96 5mo ago
  I briefly laughed out loud at another comment saying their lightbulb has more computing power than that, because that's completely plausible for a wifi bulb today.
balls187 5mo ago
The comments on this are fascinating. Although, I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN." 2 dinners out for a family of four would cover the cost of this calculator. If my kid's school required this for math, I wouldn't bat an eye at purchasing one. I needed a Ti-83 for school in 1996-1998. If you couldn't afford one, the school would loan you one for the semester. Band instruments were the same way.
- golem14 5mo ago
  > I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN." Well, it is ;) The Swiss Micros clones are pretty awesome: https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x
  - xbar 5mo ago
    I have 2 Swiss Micros and a pile of sapphire-chip designed-in-Corvallis USA-made HPs. The DM41x is pure joy in the hand. But I still texted the pink TI-84 EVO to my 16-year-old daughter because she doesn't like my stodgy TI-84 CE Plus (which I love).
    - golem14 5mo ago
      Same story here. I still have the HP15C I learned assembly language on ;) None worse for the wear. They'll all come handy after the acopalypse.
  - natas 5mo ago
    I'd take a dm42n over any Ti anyday.
thomasfl 5mo ago
Distraction free tools like this calculator, is increasingly important to help keeping focus.
ndiddy 5mo ago
From here: https://www.cemetech.net/news/2026/4/1062/_/ti-84-evo-calculator-released-fast-graphing-new-ui-new-hardware https://www.cemetech.net/news/2026/4/1062/_/ti-84-evo-calcul... > 3x Processing Power - Matching one of the speculated options, the calculator appears to use an ARM Cortex CPU, finally retiring the z80 and ez80 family of CPUs that were used in three decades of TI-83 and TI-84 Plus graphing calculators. It's running at 156MHz, compared to the 48MHz of the older calculators. It appears likely that in an unexpected break from over 30 years of TI's operating system codebase, the OS has been re-implemented with new features natively on the ARM CPU rather than using an ez80 emulator to run an updated form of the TI-84 Plus CE operating system. It looks like TI is finally moving away from the Z80. This must have been a pretty big engineering effort on TI's part. Like the article says, up to this point all of TI's low-end graphing calculators have been Z80 based and use the same system software that has a lineage dating back to the early 1990s. They were previously so wedded to the Z80 that when they introduced Python programming to their calculators, they did so by adding an ARM microcontroller that runs MicroPython, while the main eZ80 CPU acts as a serial terminal.
- neuroelectron 5mo ago
  Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only. For the educational market, this "security" is a selling point. It guarantees that a student isn't running unauthorized code or "cheating" apps. It also likely allows OTA auditing of the classroom's state.
  - fph 5mo ago
    What prevents a motivated cheater from swapping out the processor entirely?
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - RealityVoid 5mo ago
      The effort.
scarecrw 5mo ago
I'm surprised to see "Approved for Exams" featured so prominently, as handheld calculators for lots of standardized exams are being phased out. All of the exams listed are either already offered in a computerized format or in a transition phase, with the PSAT, SAT, APs, and ACT all already offering Desmos in their testing apps. I love handheld calculators, but, especially in a time-sensitive environment, it's hard to beat a large screen and full keyboard.
- jmalicki 5mo ago
  TIL Desmos. Thanks for the interesting info, seems super cool!
- bluebands 5mo ago
  for context tests like SAT, ACT, and some AP exams are using Desmos, yes however: - this means you have to fiddle with a popover window and can't always see the full problem (especially when the reference sheet is also online) - you have less muscle memory and often take longer - harder to multitask (you use paper anyways, and the paper to calculator friction is lower than the paper to trackpad friction - trackpads on school computers are usually worse, which compounds the problem - some specific functions just don't exist essentially using Desmos is like using a physical mouse/trackpad, while using your calculator is like using VIM motions and keyboard shortcuts with a concave split keyboard. it's technically more intuitive and can help in certain scenarios, but it's useful to have both. this sounds trivial, but it's not, especially on tests where you have about or less than a minute per question ideally you have both a handheld calculator and Desmos though
  - jacobolus 5mo ago
    Ideally the tests would not require external tools at all. There's nothing that needs to be tested in the context of a high school course that can't done with pencil and paper.
    - saagarjha 5mo ago
      There are a lot of interesting problems that can be done with a calculator, though
dramm 5mo ago
Hand reaches over and I lovingly pat the HP-67 sitting on my desk.
adamtaylor_13 5mo ago
"Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction" They clearly haven't met a classroom of high school kids. Then again... I didn't have access to the internet in my pocket when I was in high school so....
- mkprc 5mo ago
  They're most definitely trying to ride on the recent anti-technology in school push.
neuroelectron 5mo ago
Is there any information on exactly what kind of processor is inside this thing? Since running python I'm thinking it's actually a low end mobile processor.
leni536 5mo ago
How is the battery life? Rechargeable sure is nice, but the older models lasted forever on 4 AAAs (at least my TI-83). That's one aspect that would justify the low processing power for today's standards for portable computing devices.
Willish42 5mo ago
I loved my TI-84+ SE and wish I still had it (had all sorts of custom programs on it but it got lost or stolen before I finished high school). That said, I find it really hard to believe that they can't provide better specs and feature set for the cost. User-available memory of 3.5MB is incredibly low, especially with Python support. These could be really cool handheld computers if TI put more effort into their devices that already have a massive install base. Currently, most of their popularity in my experience is "lock in" effect from teachers who are familiar with TI calculators and lab / curriculum materials that are specifically built around teaching through TI calculators. At this rate they're charging a lot and resting on their near monopoly status in education, which I'm sure is very profitable for TI. There used to be a great app called WabbitEmu that emulated these devices on Android. I think they got a cease and desist but it was pretty neat to have back in the day
dmitrygr 5mo ago
The race to run custom code on these is on :D
skrrtww 5mo ago
But can it play BlockDude?
eunos 5mo ago
I have no idea how on earth a scientific calculator costs almost as much as a cheap android phone. Do they use oled and snapdragon soc these days? Back in my school days a 20$ Casio seems more than enough.
randyburden 5mo ago
I learned to program on a TI-83 and later bought a TI-84+ with the cable that allowed me to transfer my apps and games between my device and other students devices. I have fond memories of hand typing into a TI-83 BASIC for hours using code I found online at the local library - games like Drug Wars and other similar choose this or that console based games. I would later get a USB cable that allowed me to download apps and games onto my device. Good times. Decades later and I'm still programming.
tom1337890 5mo ago
Loved it in university and still use it on my phone: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.eanema.graph89/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.eanema.graph89/
commentprotocol 5mo ago
is any of this really necessary now that we have LLMs ?
- peesem 5mo ago
  ever been to school?
- WolfeReader 5mo ago
  Yes, things that are not LLMs continue to be useful and interesting even though LLMs exist. I hate what AI hype is doing to peoples' brains here.
ziofill 5mo ago
About 25 years ago my parents got me a Ti84 as a surprise for Christmas and they hid it in the attic so I couldn't find it in the meantime. A few months went by and a couple days before Christmas, when it was time to wrap the presents they couldn't find it anymore. My dad went out and got a Casio something as a late minute replacement, and that was the calculator I used in high school and I never knew about this story. Then last year I found a Ti84 in my parents attic...
- 7thpower 5mo ago
  Was this the first time you had realized that they did, in fact, love you the entire time?
- TheMagicHorsey 5mo ago
  Hahaha! This is great. Somewhat related. My mom once yelled at me for losing a necklace she really liked. Then we were moving her stuff out of her house and found the necklace behind a wardrobe, wedged between it and the wall. It had been there for like 40 years, layered in dust.
  - linsomniac 5mo ago
    My mom once was getting ready for work and I hear a pop and hear my mom yelling. I go in and her necklace fell off the dresser; a "dust buster" wall wart was plugged in back there and it fell across the prongs, shorting it out.
    - jkubicek 5mo ago
      This is why you always mount outlets with the grounding pin facing up!
      - cluckindan 5mo ago
        How does that help?
higgins 5mo ago
nostalgia
amelius 5mo ago
If only kids of today loved this more than their phones.
devanshranjan 5mo ago
[dead]
QuantumSeed 5mo ago
If only they would build a Ti-84 RPN, I would snap it up in a heartbeat
- crispyambulance 5mo ago
  Apparently, you can use it in RPN mode!
whalesalad 5mo ago
The only thing I used mine for in high school was playing Phoenix and Drug Wars.
gigatexal 5mo ago
I do have fond memories of my TI-82 (we couldn't afford the fancier 84 or 89). I wonder, though, after all these years did Texas Instruments corner the market and obtain an monopoly on allowed calculators for proctored tests or ... because it sure is a shame there's not competition here driving the cost of these things down and the features way up.
nathan_compton 5mo ago
You can claw my HP48 out of my cold, dead, hands.
j2kun 5mo ago
Python programming with 156 MHz and 3.5 MiB of RAM? Can a Python REPL even start up with that profile?
- duskwuff 5mo ago
  3.5 MB is pretty generous, actually! Some older TI-84 models had MicroPython running on a secondary ATSAMD21 processor with 32 KB of RAM - that was effectively unusable.
deferredgrant 5mo ago
[flagged]
jsrozner 5mo ago
I personally think this is stupid (e.g., the new interface for selecting functions). The interface on original 84 was better. I still have mine from 15 years ago. I still use it.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Beijinger 5mo ago
Simply the best: https://www.hp.com/us-en/calculators.html https://www.hp.com/us-en/calculators.html
nateburke 5mo ago
Ti-30x is all you need.
dwa3592 5mo ago
I don't get it. Who is buying these calculators nowadays? It's expensive and any plot it can generate is 1 prompt away from the AI that students are already using. Also why is there a calculator license? what even is that?
beeandapenguin 5mo ago
Q: Who else had their first exposure to programming on a Ti-83/4 calculator?
throwaway85825 5mo ago
I want a desk calculator keyboard that works with my phone. New TIs are just really cheap phones now.
legel 5mo ago
Very very warm nostalgic fuzzy feelings here
dgrin91 5mo ago
Why do you need an online calculator subscription? I can kind of get why you want a physical calculator, especially for a school environment, but why would you want a calculator online when you can just use... the rest of the web?
dbg31415 5mo ago
But no mention of the most important feature… I just need to know that it can still play Drug Wars.
uejfiweun 5mo ago
The Python inclusion is fascinating to me. I, like many other kids in the US, did a lot of calculator programming with the TI-84 back in school. It definitely taught me the basics in a way that made my CS classes much easier. I'm jealous of the kids who now get to make that journey with Python instead of TI-Basic.
markus_zhang 5mo ago
Can we still program assembly on this one? There must be a way to hack it open.
idatum 5mo ago
Bring back the HP-10c. RPN with "scientific calculator" label. Pure and simple, and approved for testing that forbids any programmable devices. EDIT: oops, conflated with HP-35, from a decade earlier. 10c was programmable. HP-35 was not.
clamprecht 5mo ago
My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years. Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed the TI-85 so its startup screen read, "TI-85 NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR". Problem solved.
- t1234s 5mo ago
  You sir are the hardest person on HN
- sizzle 5mo ago
  How long were you locked up in the clink for? Did you get any access to computers there? How did your time there affect you or change how you think? Thanks for sharing
  - postalcoder 5mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht
    - lioeters 5mo ago
      > First person banned from the Internet Legend.
      - alterom 5mo ago
        Indeed.
  - owenpalmer 5mo ago
    70 months, or 5.83 years
  - clamprecht 5mo ago
racl101 5mo ago
That is the coolest graphing calculator I've ever seen.
easygenes 5mo ago
This has me pining for a future professional class CAS 3d graphing calculator. I'm thinking something that could be a major upgrade in spirit to the long-in-the-tooth (released a decade ago) Casio FX-CG500. Could use the soon to be released ARM C-1 Nano and Pro cores in an SoC with stacked 2GB LPDDR4, USB-C charging to a large battery, high-res transflective LCD... Mockup "AxiomPad Pro X1": https://enia.cc/out/axiompad-cas-mock.png https://enia.cc/out/axiompad-cas-mock.png
Centigonal 5mo ago
Great memories writing games in TI-BASIC on sheets of loose-leaf paper to later transcribe manually into my TI-84+.
intrasight 5mo ago
I didn't have a calculator until my senior year of highschool. But since we weren't alliwed to use them in tests, I didn't feel like I was missing anything. As an engineering student at CMU, I had an HP 15c like everyone else. A few years back when I found out they are coveted, I sold mine on ebay. I have an emulator on my phone. I assume that calculators will continue to evolve and that my grandchildren will have a Propædeutic Enchiridion.
wg0 5mo ago
It's a beautiful device so much that hacker inside me wants to poke into what CPU they have and design a similar one in Verilog myself then put it on FPGA with similar display and it's driver then a 3D printed case and keys too.
collinmanderson 5mo ago
Shout out to https://ticalc.org/ https://ticalc.org/ - the design is pretty much unchanged.
j_m_b 5mo ago
Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these. I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.
schaefer 5mo ago
I'll take my father's HP 49g to my grave. but if TI wanted to flirt with me, all it would take is a setting to enable Reverse Polish Notation. (I did check the features, and no mention).
shostack 5mo ago
My ti-82/83 got me into programming because I hated math so much that I taught myself to code an app that would help walk me through how to do various problems. I got in trouble but it was worth it. Also, drug wars, x wing vs tie fighter, and all sorts of other awesome games were definitely the fun thing to do with these.
kenjackson 5mo ago
Who is using this on the SAT when there is Desmos?
LeFantome 5mo ago
How are these still so slow?
wolfi1 5mo ago
Do these graphing calculators still use Derive (tm)? pity, there is no pc version anymore
aggregator-ios 5mo ago
I was introduced to the 83 Plus and it was simply the most mindblowing device at the time. We were given a sheet to share with our parents on why it was an important device to own/borrow. Me and several friends would trade apps through the TI-Link cable, and we would play games, write software for it and there was even a popularity rank in school about whose program was installed on more calculators. For a lot of people it introduced them to TI-Basic which was quite capable, and for others you could get into Assembly which allowed for more powerful applications. There were 2 parts of the memory, BASIC programs were in regular memory that could be easily erased, and another part which was Flash Apps. I later upgraded to the 89 which had a better CPU, screen resolution and processing power and it was phenomenal in helping me understand every single math class, including EE/EECS. It made me sad to see them banned in exams, because having a 83+/89/any calculator was in no way helpful in any of the exams I took, but it was more of a "control the students" thing in college. The Math department determined that because they couldn't prove that people were not using the internet/portable PC's in their calculators, that they could not guarantee the fairness of it all. Weird argument to make knowing that a 20 year old student was engineering a full internet capable PC into a calculator at the time would have been the envy of the world (and every engineering program). This all depends on the quality of education and not simply handing out problems that require rote memorization of the methods to solve an equation and instead derive or figure out the equation yourself after understanding the problem after which you're free to use the calculator to "plug and chug".
CephalopodMD 5mo ago
Wasting time making games on my TI84 in the back of middle school geometry taught me how to program.
jedberg 5mo ago
Summary of the comments in here: * I used the programming functionality of the calculator to get around the rules * I didn't care much for the math, but my TI calculator was my first programming experience and it's what got me to love programming My experience is similar. We were allowed to use our TI-85s in class, but we had to go up to the teacher before the test and show him that we were running a factory reset, to prove we had nothing programmed in it to cheat. My buddy and I had made a two player blackjack game and didn't want to have to retype it after every test. So instead we made a program that mimicked the factory reset process. You would run the program before walking up tot he front. The only indication something was different was the three little dots in the corner indicating a programming was running, but we just covered that with our thumbs. Ironically we never used it to cheat, only to not erase our game that we programmed!
- fudged71 5mo ago
  I wonder how many of us had the exact same experience (down to those damn three little dots!)
- donatj 5mo ago
  Our study hall in Junior High would wipe your calculator as you signed in to ensure you weren't playing games, god forbid. I would claim not to have my calculator, and often not do my math homework in study hall just to avoid getting my calculator wiped.
- move-on-by 5mo ago
  My experience is not much different then what you listed, except I discussed programming with my math teacher. She said as long as I was the one who programmed it, and that I didn’t share the program with anyone else, the I could use it. Looking back on that experience, I’m very grateful to her, but she also probably didn’t realize I was programming it to also show the individual ‘steps’ to get the solution instead of just the solution.
genxy 5mo ago
price, 165$ which is ridiculous for a device that costs them less than 20$ to build.
poink 5mo ago
As someone who built a custom serial cable (not my idea, greetz to the original designer) to load assembly programs on TI-85s for all my friends, the “approved for exams” shit is so funny
kernz 5mo ago
Classic hacker mindset - the rule said no programmable calculators, so you made it say it wasn't one. Security through labeling.
snvzz 5mo ago
TI calculators peaked with TI-89/92/v200. Functionality, low latency UX, long battery life. These are still readily available in the second hand market, at very reasonable pricing (thanks to them selling well back then). Unfortunately, ever since, they seem to have decided to imitate smartphones and focus on making restricted devices for exam taking, rather than tools to empower the user.
trelliumD 5mo ago
the best calculator is of course a RPN calculator, preferably a HP 48GX, but HP Prime also suffices. Swissmicros DM42N is a good second :-)
trelliumD 5mo ago
HP48GX rules, HP Prime is a solid second. SwissMicros DM42N is a solid third.
- natas 5mo ago
  I don't have a prime, but agreed on 48gx + dm42n without a doubt. I'd add the 50g as another contender, doesn't depend so much on external memory cards (which have the tendency to fail) and is fairly aligned with the 48/49 line.
aarc 5mo ago
I still have my TI-83 plus. It's been with me for 25 years now! I've always kept it on my desk, despite the fact that I engraved 'KoЯn' on cover when I was 13 or 14.
rgovostes 5mo ago
In high school I had the TI-89 Titanium. Like everyone here, I got into programming it using some USB adapter I could attach to my iMac G5 and the TI Connect app[0]. One day, vexed by something, I vented my frustration by composing a profanity-laced rant into the Feedback window of the TI Connect app. (I don't recall the proximate cause, but I remember complaining that the product itself, which is still $110 today, is a total ripoff.) I was certainly surprised when the (sole?) TI Connect developer responded by e-mail taking umbrage at my complaints. 0: https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-connect-sw https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-co...
- saagarjha 5mo ago
  I just put up with TiLP which I somehow figured out how to build on macOS. I think I still have cruft from that attempt on my machine years later somewhere
alter_igel 5mo ago
I used to doodle and make pixel art on my TI 84+ in high school. I'd spend entire classes just clicking left, right, up, down, and enter to move and toggle individual pixels with a simple program I'd written. https://timstr.website/artwork/ti84plus.html https://timstr.website/artwork/ti84plus.html
Surac 5mo ago
To bad it is still made for pupils and not engineers. I tried using it for computer science and math and it lost to a Casio
itrunsdoomguy 5mo ago
Does it run Doom?
biosboiii 5mo ago
I find it interesting that TI still seems to use custom ASIC chips for their calculators. Any MCU out of their portfolio should be fully capable of driving the display, reading the keyboard. And the math should be lightweight for even the smallest processors nowadays.
xvilka 5mo ago
Does it still use Zilog eZ80 (Z80-family, 24-bit) as the main CPU?
baalimago 5mo ago
Conclusion from reading HN comments: very few used the calculator to actually calculate anything
- a96 5mo ago
  Wouldn't be hacking to use things for their intended purpose.
wiz21c 5mo ago
I use Qalculate! quite a lot (but for rather simple things). However, I miss the "physical" aspect of having real buttons. How woud this Ti-84 Evo compare ? https://qalculate.github.io/ https://qalculate.github.io/
lqstuart 5mo ago
I had a TI-89 in high school. I was that kid.
cbondurant 5mo ago
Personally, I don't think I have much benefit in a new generation TI-84. I still own a TI-85, a model that was discontinued before I was born, and it is still an objectively superior tool for doing small calculations than any other alternative. For instance, we compare the phone calculator. My phone fills a lot of really important roles besides being a calculator, ones that necessitate a password. So first I have to unlock my phone. Then I have to leave whatever app I had open before. Then I need to find the damn calculator app. That's 5-6 seconds of friction, depending on how responsive my phone feels like being and how many times I fatfinger my password because the concept of "muscle memory" on a touch screen is practically an oxymoron. Not to mention, you cant just walk away from the desk for a moment with the calculator app left open on your phone, ready to come back at a moments notice, like you can with a dedicated calculator. Phones are just too important for that. There's arguable pros and cons to using your PC over a calculator, but I think that discussion is a lot more nuanced. Either way, a PC is definitely less portable than your phone or a calculator. Maybe I'll be convinced to upgrade at whatever point they add usb-c and a rechargeable battery to their lowest trim model. Not before that though.
charles_f 5mo ago
It runs python!? I still have my ti89, and my brother's 83. My kids will learn to write text based dealer simulation in ti-basic, then 68k assembly, like real men^. ^ they're boys so that cliche works
corvad 5mo ago
The UI reminds me quite a bit like https://www.numworks.com/calculator/apps/ https://www.numworks.com/calculator/apps/
xyproto 5mo ago
I wonder why they don't have a "Buy now" button on their website.
thatoneengineer 5mo ago
I see we've finally progressed beyond https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/, in specs if not in functionality or price point.
fithisux 5mo ago
This is a very useful gadget and without any AI
joncooper 5mo ago
I'm an HP-12C guy since working on a trading desk and have 2 of the OG bronze colored ones and 2 of the HP-12C Platinum that are faster and silvery. But since I've been re-learning math with Math Academy I'm drawn to pick this puppy up. Should I be looking at an HP equivalent, though, since I'm an RPN convert?
kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 5mo ago
I love that the first thing I see in the website (at least on mobile) is "Approved for exams", as if there was some other reason one would be forced to buy those pieces of garbage.
rldjbpin 5mo ago
crazy to see the og 84 plus still shown in the comparison, still unchanged from all these years! do they only refer to the web app whenever they mention "online" as an adjective for the calculator? just a weird situation to be in. given the MASSIVE margin they got selling these, i really wish they had an eink display. given the performance characteristics it would have been a great fit imho.

603 points by thatxliner 5mo ago

I always thought they should make a thin, metal, foldable 83 variant that just bends in the middle and looks like a cigarette case.

omgJustTest 5mo ago

But when will it run GPT? (:

Yossarrian22 5mo ago

Ti really needs to stop with the artificial product differentiation. There's no reason 15 years after the Nspire CX CAS came out that everyone of their calculators can't do CAS.

alfalfasprout 5mo ago
Heck, you could do a decent amount with the CAS back in the TI-89.
- selectodude 5mo ago
  Decent? I'm not sure the new CAS models do anything that the TI-89 didn't.
- 15155 5mo ago
  Which is why it was notoriously banned from exams.
- metadat 5mo ago
  TI-89 is the GOAT!
NetMageSCW 5mo ago
The reason is exam requirements - some professional certifications don’t allow CAS calculators and have other restrictions.
loeg 5mo ago
It doesn't help students learn if the tool does everything for them. This isn't a tool for professionals.
JoshTriplett 5mo ago
Advanced calculators are in an unusual space with external constraints on it. Some of the features or differentiation they add serves the constraint of "if you don't, we won't let students use it in the classroom". When a calculator is used in a classroom, there's a concern about people using the calculator to replace the skill that's being taught. So, for instance, there's space for a calculator with no CAS, for a class that's trying to teach you to do algebra. That is in some ways easier than "don't use this function of the calculator".
- ndriscoll 5mo ago
  My linear algebra class used F_2 as our field probably half the time that it was specified. Realistically almost any course probably doesn't need calculators at all (or they could at least be kept for homework). If you're not teaching arithmetic, you keep the arithmetic simple. If you're not teaching algebra, you keep the algebra simple. etc.
- Ekaros 5mo ago
  It is not really classroom. It is more so setting testing standard that matches the standardised testing that schooling aims for. This ofc then extends to testing in classroom tests as that is best way to prepare students. Not that any of this matter anymore as it can be entirely replaced with LLMs in near future.
- ndiddy 5mo ago
  Yeah there's not really a purpose for advanced calculators anymore (apart from the niche market of people who just enjoy using them). Calculators are basically only a thing now to make it harder to cheat on exams. If you don't have that constraint, you might as well use Wolfram or Matlab or whatever.
  - vkou 5mo ago
    Or, here's a wild idea - exam problems should be structured such that they do not require any advanced calculator. Math problems should not require any calculator. Physics problems should require a scientific calculator. Overcomplicating the arithmetic shouldn't be the point.
xp84 5mo ago
I don't think it's been about costs or CPU for at least 20 years, but isn't it more that for kids to learn to do math, it's better not to have CAS always at hand? So that's why there are some in the lineup without it.
sosborn 5mo ago
CAS capabilities are prohibited in the SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-do/calculator-policy#:~:text=Calculators%20with%20CAS%20(computer%20algebra,students%20who%20take%20the%20SAT. https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-do/calcu...
- hatsunearu 5mo ago
  Wow, they used to be allowed back when I was in high school. It came in super clutch for SAT but much more importantly AP. Our school mandated the original CS CAS and drilled us on how to use it effectively and I got good mileage out of it through high school testing and college. I lost it at some point and got the version 2 and I would occasionally use it for work. I wish it had USB-C because who has a mini-B cable for charging these days
  - frostiness 5mo ago
    As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
    - hatsunearu 5mo ago
      Forgot what menu-3-1 is lol, I would use solve() all the time though. Got super good at typing that with my thumbs really fast
  - peesem 5mo ago
    CollegeBoard only seemed to realize recently, the ban on CAS calculators on the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams came last September if I remember correctly, maybe August or October
  - BoorishBears 5mo ago
    I vaguely remember they were banned by a proxy that stopped working after the Ti-89 came out: no QWERTY keyboards Originally that blocked the Ti-92, but then the Ti-89 and Nspire line had numeric keypads + CAS
dheera 5mo ago
Honest question: Why do we need physical graphing calculators anymore? Can't this just be a phone app? That screen resolution for one is horrible for 2026.
- loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
  Mostly for students in settings that may disallow either smartphones or calculators with specific advanced features (schools, SAT exams etc) Also I don’t know about you but these days I welcome stuff that allows me to stay away from the damn phone.
- 8note 5mo ago
  i moved my ti-89 to be a phone app, but it was much much slower to type on the soft keyboard than it is to press the actual buttons.
- mkprc 5mo ago
  It's about ensuring "academic honesty" on exams. Also, it's nice to have buttons rather than a touchscreen. Also, there is something to be said about using a device with a different form-factor than the one on which a student also scrolls TikTok/IG and distracts themselves otherwise.
- akgoel 5mo ago
  You don't. Most academic uses are now replaced by desmos, which is also used on the SAT. It's free, it's fast, and it does most of what you need.
- saagarjha 5mo ago
  I am pretty sure I could use a TI-89 Titanium in the dark even now

guizzy 5mo ago

> Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction 15 year old me in math class programming my loaned TI-82: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

IIAOPSW 5mo ago
Jokes on you, you learned to program.
- a96 5mo ago
  Didn't let schooling interfere with their education.

aaronbrethorst 5mo ago

$160 at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI84-TI-Calculator/dp/B0G8SFR7DH?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI84-TI-Calculator/... Not as bad as I would've expected. Also, apparently it includes a very simple Python environment? https://education.ti.com/en/product-resources/eguides/eguide-84-evo/python https://education.ti.com/en/product-resources/eguides/eguide...

retired 5mo ago
For a $10 BoM and maybe a year of R&D I would say that $160 is bad.
- aaronbrethorst 5mo ago
  A TI-83 was about $100 in the year 2000, and it doesn't look like it's that much cheaper today. I would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging their very captive market.
  - LeCompteSftware 5mo ago
    But you can't divorce that from computing technology in general. A TI-83 used a z80 in 2000 and was priced at 1990's z80 rates, it was already gouging even back then! Now 26 years later the TI-84 uses an ez80 (or something something similar), which was introduced in 2001. TI has always gouged their captive market. It is just increasingly ridiculous when those students also have smartphones. FWIW I think these graphing calculators are quite good for 2026 students! It is nice to have a computer which is actually comprehensible. They just need to be more like $50. $160 is just evil.
    - aaronbrethorst 5mo ago
      Shrug. The SAT and ACT don't let you use an iPhone on their exams. $160 is what the market will bear. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it just is, and perhaps there's a market for a much cheaper competitor to beat TI here.

eiiot 5mo ago

Interesting that this doesn't seem to include a computer algebra system like the Nspire CAS. Wonder if it's a testing environment compliance thing?

ezfe 5mo ago
Absolutely is

mettamage 5mo ago

It runs Python! National exams will be wild for the kids capable of programming or vibe coding.

retired 5mo ago
With a 156MHz processor and 3.5 megabytes of user-available memory the kids will even learn how to optimize their code!

JoshTriplett 5mo ago

> Not just an upgrade — an EVOlution Oh no.

girvo 5mo ago
You’re absolutely right! …LLM-isms are like nails on chalkboard I swear. Instant turn off the moment I read them. Even if they’re maybe not lol, doesn’t matter my visceral reaction is negative.
- Apocryphon 5mo ago
  That's just what standard marketing copy sounds like. ...which perhaps says a lot about the corpora that the models are trained on.
smlacy 5mo ago
156 MHz!!!!
- billforsternz 5mo ago
  Surprisingly high or surprisingly low?
  - smlacy 5mo ago
    IMHO surprisingly low. Still not clear to me why they don't just port these things to ARM or similar?
    - billforsternz 5mo ago
      Thanks for clarifying. I think this is an ARM and a break from a history of Z80 and Z80 adjacent CPUs. I do get the impression TI have done a good (financial) job milking these products whilst under investing in real product innovation.
    - samtheDamned 5mo ago

moffkalast 5mo ago

Genuine question, who uses these in practice? In my experience, calculators beyond the basic were always banned in high school and college, cause everyone's so afraid people might store something into them, and afterwards it's just matlab and python. It's not like laptops aren't a thing that everyone has on hand.

NetMageSCW 5mo ago
You may have gone to a poor high school and college. I saw plenty of calculator use in high school and college a long time ago.
- moffkalast 5mo ago
  Sure calculators were allowed in some cases, the "scientific" kind, not the graphing kind. But yes I would agree. So much time spent making sure people don't learn to use the tools they'll always have on hand. Programming exams on paper and that kind of inane bullshit.
  - darthwalsh 5mo ago
    In my USA high School, they started requiring graphing calculators in the 9th grade math class. You would fail most quizzes/exams without the ability to run the calculations that scientific calculators couldn't do. I'm struggling to remember using my TI-84 in college though.
- Toutouxc 5mo ago
  Poor? In what sense? I graduated a few years ago (in Europe) and I think I could’ve gone through my entire education without owning one. Math, for me, went from nice numbers to ugly numbers that you had to do by hand (because that was the point), then to just letters and squiggles. At no point was there a need to work with hard numbers or to learn to work with a physical calculator (I haven’t seen one in the wild in years).
pclowes 5mo ago
IIRC You don’t use them in the dumb kids class much, you use them a fair amount in the sort of smart class, and you don’t use them much in the actually smart class.

LeoPanthera 5mo ago

What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations? Or are we all just using software on our computers now. That would be sad. (I've had a Casio fx-991EX on my desk for a few years, that replaced a broken Casio fx-991ES. Though designed for academia, its operation is burned into my brain at this point.)

JoshTriplett 5mo ago
> What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations? I still have my TI-85, but I essentially haven't used it since I left college. For 99% of what I need, I use either Python, or what's built into Firefox (e.g. unit conversion), or DDG. For that last 1% (e.g. full CAS functionality), I tend to grab whatever web-based non-AI tool is handy.
- ezfe 5mo ago
  Web based AI tools are remarkably helpful these days since they no longer try to do math themselves and instead write python to do it.
wtallis 5mo ago
I use emu48 on my phone emulating the HP-50g, which was almost exactly the same size as the phone so my muscle memory somewhat carries over (minus the tactile feedback of a real keyboard). I still have the physical calculator on my desk at home, with no batteries in it so it's only usable within reach of its USB cable. Anything that goes beyond what that calculator's UI can reasonably handle is going to end up in a Jupyter notebook or something like that.
- drivers99 5mo ago
  Similarly, I still have my HP-42s but I usually use Free42[0] on my phone and tablet. They also have it for desktops. It's great if you like RPN calculators. Or if anyone wants to learn about them, you can use that program and follow along with the original manual(s)[1]. It's nice to be able to handle the order of operations without parentheses. [0] https://thomasokken.com/free42/ https://thomasokken.com/free42/ I should send them a donation. [1] https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-om-en.pdf https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-om-en.pdf followed by https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-prog-en.pdf https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-prog-en.pdf

wyre 5mo ago

It has Python? That's pretty cool.

petra303 5mo ago
It doesn’t have a qwerty keyboard. That would be such a pain to type on. For some reason qwerty keyboard calculators are banned in tests.
- Ekaros 5mo ago
  I think those were aimed at different market segments. And that would be engineers, professionals and working academics that is not students. Generally limitations in education on what was allowed led to more limited feature sets. Where as full feature set that could be upsold with qwerty keyboard was aimed for different users.

cyanureworld 5mo ago

There's the NumWorks which is very similar for a more reasonable price, that also run Python

Jyaif 5mo ago
And you can tell that TI pretty clearly copied the NumWorks calculator.
mikehotel 5mo ago
Numworks is so much better. According to kids that have access to Ti and HP graphing calculators. The hardware and software design similarities between this Evo and Numworks is a strong endorsement.

pclowes 5mo ago

75” 4k OLED screens would have been unobtainable when I first used a TI. 10yrs ago they would have been 4 to 5 figures. Now they are what? A couple hundred? How in the world is a TI graphing calculator still $160? These 30yr old calculator chips apparently hold their value like gold…

MattDamonSpace 5mo ago
It’s got a 3x faster processor brah
- pclowes 5mo ago
  Good point, my understanding of a cubic function in 02 was totally stunted by the processor speed…
FarmerPotato 5mo ago
Wow, no comment yet for https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/

josh2600 5mo ago

[dead]

Yeri 5mo ago

What's the "online calculator license" ? "Online calculator included (four-year subscription) •($80 value)"

cristoperb 5mo ago
Apparently just a TI-84 Evo emulator(?) that you can run in a browser for $20/year: https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-calculators/ti-84-evo/ti-84-evo-online-calculator https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...
tech234a 5mo ago
My guess is that they are trying to encourage people not to use the various clones and unofficial emulators available for their calculators.

lvl155 5mo ago

Biggest ripoff in academics. There should be a cheap open source calculators for schools and exams. It’s ridiculous that TI is still charging this.

bloodyplonker22 5mo ago
The biggest ripoffs were the textbooks. Especially the textbooks written by the teachers, themselves, who forced you to buy them.

vvpan 5mo ago

We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).

pavel_lishin 5mo ago
I certainly got a lot of educational value out of mine. I managed to program a fully functional Minesweeper game on mine, using the built-in programming tools - no transferring efficient binaries via cable! But yes. 99% of what we did with them in class - when we were even allowed to use them - could have been handled by a little solar-powered calculator with basic arithmetic functions.
- joebates 5mo ago
  Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.
  - w0m 5mo ago
    same. My first real exposure to coding was hacking Drug Wars on my brothers old ti-89 in math class.
  - mrguyorama 5mo ago
    Same. I bounced off a python 2 tutorial and a C tutorial, but some random nobody's TI-BASIC tutorial that started really damn easy is how I became a Computer Scientist. I eventually figured out python too! I made my own game and got a little notoriety around the school for it.
  - beeandapenguin 5mo ago
    Same for me, it was also my first time ever seeing code, and I still remember it well. While getting ready for swim practice in a locker room, my friend challenged me to beat his score on a button mashing game he programmed earlier that day in school on his TI-84. My 12 year old self was in awe of his BASIC skills.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

palmotea 5mo ago

> Simplified keypad > The keypad layout removes clutter and makes commands and shortcuts easier to see, so you can work faster with fewer steps. I don't see it. I compared a screenshot of one of these to a older T-84, and it looks like they have same number of buttons, and the buttons are just as cluttered (except the EVO has secondary labels on the keycaps instead of the case). That's a good thing, since one of the best things about calculators is they typically have a ton of buttons for quick access to a lot of functions.

nxobject 5mo ago
On my favorite designs ever? The first TI-Nspire "battleship" keyboard. Mini alpha-symbol keys in the corners of actual keys. It looked so annoying, but my muscle memory got very good at it. https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-DOR2014-05202&max=600 https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-DOR2014-05202...

esafak 5mo ago

It's a shame that maths in American schools is equated with calculation. All you need to be a mathematician is a calculator!

jasonmp85 5mo ago
[dead]

wslh 5mo ago

Looking at the price of this and other calculators, I wonder if there's a market for "dumb calculators" analogous to dumb terminals: a device with the calculator form factor, keyboard, and display, but where the actual computation happens on a paired computer/phone or a cloud endpoint over WiFi/Bluetooth.

Willish42 5mo ago
The cost of these devices isn't the computation, and if anything more connectivity would probably make these more expensive and harder to use (many "smart" devices in classrooms have networking issues and if even one of them can't connect, it hurts the ability to run a lesson). I think standalone computation abilities are pretty important, and connectivity can be a downside for preventing cheating in standardized exams etc.

kristopolous 5mo ago

Show me a highschool math problem you can't do on a $12 Casio scientific like the classic FX-300MS https://www.usaofficemachines.com/csofx300ms-fx-300ms-scientific-calculator-10-digit-lcd-by-casio-inc.html https://www.usaofficemachines.com/csofx300ms-fx-300ms-scient... There's even knockoffs of it for $1: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809744184708.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809744184708.html I picked one up when the 99 cent store was shutting down. It works fine. Look what you can get for $20: https://www.casio.com/intl/scientific-calculators/product.FX-350CW/ https://www.casio.com/intl/scientific-calculators/product.FX... TI is like the Intuit of the education world. I want to love them but this is ridiculous - a N4120 celeron laptop is the same price as this new calculator - it might be a garbage laptop but it's doing a heck of a lot more for your $160 than this calculator is.

rogerrogerr 5mo ago
The contrived ones where they make you graph stuff, but that’s about it.
- vkou 5mo ago
  There is no graphing problem that you'll be asked to solve before university that can't be plotted to a 'good enough for high school' level by hand in seconds. Four data points is sufficient to give you a 'good enough' shape and position of a second-degree polynomial. Five or six for a third-degree one. (And you barely see them, and don't learn how to algebraically solve for their roots in high school anyways, because the cubic factoring formula is a pig.) If you can't tell what a function's plotted shape is going to be at a glance, you haven't learned the material to the degree expected of an attentive child.
  - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
    This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator. Besides, it is expected that a student can use a graphing calculator to be able to numerically solve for a root of arbitrary polynomial equation.

chaqchase 5mo ago

Nice to see the hardware move forward. I still wish calculators were more open, or at least less locked into school-age pricing.

nxobject 5mo ago

And those goddamn displays still have the pixel density of a Tamagotchi.

BewareTheYiga 5mo ago

You will have to pry my TI-89 from my cold dead hands. I wish they still made it

Mathochist 5mo ago

Those who have used various classic HP calculators in the past may be interested in this: https://www.swissmicros.com/products https://www.swissmicros.com/products These are clones of various older calculators.

kstrauser 5mo ago
I bought a DM42n last year. I didn't need it. I don't use it so often that I can justify its purchase. Still, wow, I do so enjoy working with it. It's one of those tools that just feels good to use.
- SirHumphrey 5mo ago
  There is a certain joy in working with RPN and in using a piece of technology that was designed as a tool, not as a toy or an educational appliance. With phone emulation, I probably need half a calculator. I have three.
  - kstrauser 5mo ago
    That's so true. It's custom-built to do exactly one thing, as efficiently and ergonomically as possible. I love any tool like that.

Ekaros 5mo ago

156MHz and 3,5MB user memory... Why do I feel like that is a joke these days.. I think some ESP32s are faster and have more memory, but not sure if they are fully comparable...

a96 5mo ago
I briefly laughed out loud at another comment saying their lightbulb has more computing power than that, because that's completely plausible for a wifi bulb today.

balls187 5mo ago

The comments on this are fascinating. Although, I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN." 2 dinners out for a family of four would cover the cost of this calculator. If my kid's school required this for math, I wouldn't bat an eye at purchasing one. I needed a Ti-83 for school in 1996-1998. If you couldn't afford one, the school would loan you one for the semester. Band instruments were the same way.

golem14 5mo ago
> I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN." Well, it is ;) The Swiss Micros clones are pretty awesome: https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x
- xbar 5mo ago
  I have 2 Swiss Micros and a pile of sapphire-chip designed-in-Corvallis USA-made HPs. The DM41x is pure joy in the hand. But I still texted the pink TI-84 EVO to my 16-year-old daughter because she doesn't like my stodgy TI-84 CE Plus (which I love).
  - golem14 5mo ago
    Same story here. I still have the HP15C I learned assembly language on ;) None worse for the wear. They'll all come handy after the acopalypse.
- natas 5mo ago
  I'd take a dm42n over any Ti anyday.

thomasfl 5mo ago

Distraction free tools like this calculator, is increasingly important to help keeping focus.

ndiddy 5mo ago

From here: https://www.cemetech.net/news/2026/4/1062/_/ti-84-evo-calculator-released-fast-graphing-new-ui-new-hardware https://www.cemetech.net/news/2026/4/1062/_/ti-84-evo-calcul... > 3x Processing Power - Matching one of the speculated options, the calculator appears to use an ARM Cortex CPU, finally retiring the z80 and ez80 family of CPUs that were used in three decades of TI-83 and TI-84 Plus graphing calculators. It's running at 156MHz, compared to the 48MHz of the older calculators. It appears likely that in an unexpected break from over 30 years of TI's operating system codebase, the OS has been re-implemented with new features natively on the ARM CPU rather than using an ez80 emulator to run an updated form of the TI-84 Plus CE operating system. It looks like TI is finally moving away from the Z80. This must have been a pretty big engineering effort on TI's part. Like the article says, up to this point all of TI's low-end graphing calculators have been Z80 based and use the same system software that has a lineage dating back to the early 1990s. They were previously so wedded to the Z80 that when they introduced Python programming to their calculators, they did so by adding an ARM microcontroller that runs MicroPython, while the main eZ80 CPU acts as a serial terminal.

neuroelectron 5mo ago
Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only. For the educational market, this "security" is a selling point. It guarantees that a student isn't running unauthorized code or "cheating" apps. It also likely allows OTA auditing of the classroom's state.
- fph 5mo ago
  What prevents a motivated cheater from swapping out the processor entirely?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - RealityVoid 5mo ago
    The effort.

scarecrw 5mo ago

I'm surprised to see "Approved for Exams" featured so prominently, as handheld calculators for lots of standardized exams are being phased out. All of the exams listed are either already offered in a computerized format or in a transition phase, with the PSAT, SAT, APs, and ACT all already offering Desmos in their testing apps. I love handheld calculators, but, especially in a time-sensitive environment, it's hard to beat a large screen and full keyboard.

jmalicki 5mo ago
TIL Desmos. Thanks for the interesting info, seems super cool!
bluebands 5mo ago
for context tests like SAT, ACT, and some AP exams are using Desmos, yes however: - this means you have to fiddle with a popover window and can't always see the full problem (especially when the reference sheet is also online) - you have less muscle memory and often take longer - harder to multitask (you use paper anyways, and the paper to calculator friction is lower than the paper to trackpad friction - trackpads on school computers are usually worse, which compounds the problem - some specific functions just don't exist essentially using Desmos is like using a physical mouse/trackpad, while using your calculator is like using VIM motions and keyboard shortcuts with a concave split keyboard. it's technically more intuitive and can help in certain scenarios, but it's useful to have both. this sounds trivial, but it's not, especially on tests where you have about or less than a minute per question ideally you have both a handheld calculator and Desmos though
- jacobolus 5mo ago
  Ideally the tests would not require external tools at all. There's nothing that needs to be tested in the context of a high school course that can't done with pencil and paper.
  - saagarjha 5mo ago
    There are a lot of interesting problems that can be done with a calculator, though

dramm 5mo ago

Hand reaches over and I lovingly pat the HP-67 sitting on my desk.

adamtaylor_13 5mo ago

"Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction" They clearly haven't met a classroom of high school kids. Then again... I didn't have access to the internet in my pocket when I was in high school so....

mkprc 5mo ago
They're most definitely trying to ride on the recent anti-technology in school push.

neuroelectron 5mo ago

Is there any information on exactly what kind of processor is inside this thing? Since running python I'm thinking it's actually a low end mobile processor.

leni536 5mo ago

How is the battery life? Rechargeable sure is nice, but the older models lasted forever on 4 AAAs (at least my TI-83). That's one aspect that would justify the low processing power for today's standards for portable computing devices.

Willish42 5mo ago

I loved my TI-84+ SE and wish I still had it (had all sorts of custom programs on it but it got lost or stolen before I finished high school). That said, I find it really hard to believe that they can't provide better specs and feature set for the cost. User-available memory of 3.5MB is incredibly low, especially with Python support. These could be really cool handheld computers if TI put more effort into their devices that already have a massive install base. Currently, most of their popularity in my experience is "lock in" effect from teachers who are familiar with TI calculators and lab / curriculum materials that are specifically built around teaching through TI calculators. At this rate they're charging a lot and resting on their near monopoly status in education, which I'm sure is very profitable for TI. There used to be a great app called WabbitEmu that emulated these devices on Android. I think they got a cease and desist but it was pretty neat to have back in the day

dmitrygr 5mo ago

The race to run custom code on these is on :D

skrrtww 5mo ago

But can it play BlockDude?

eunos 5mo ago

I have no idea how on earth a scientific calculator costs almost as much as a cheap android phone. Do they use oled and snapdragon soc these days? Back in my school days a 20$ Casio seems more than enough.

randyburden 5mo ago

I learned to program on a TI-83 and later bought a TI-84+ with the cable that allowed me to transfer my apps and games between my device and other students devices. I have fond memories of hand typing into a TI-83 BASIC for hours using code I found online at the local library - games like Drug Wars and other similar choose this or that console based games. I would later get a USB cable that allowed me to download apps and games onto my device. Good times. Decades later and I'm still programming.

tom1337890 5mo ago

Loved it in university and still use it on my phone: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.eanema.graph89/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.eanema.graph89/

commentprotocol 5mo ago

is any of this really necessary now that we have LLMs ?

peesem 5mo ago
ever been to school?
WolfeReader 5mo ago
Yes, things that are not LLMs continue to be useful and interesting even though LLMs exist. I hate what AI hype is doing to peoples' brains here.

ziofill 5mo ago

About 25 years ago my parents got me a Ti84 as a surprise for Christmas and they hid it in the attic so I couldn't find it in the meantime. A few months went by and a couple days before Christmas, when it was time to wrap the presents they couldn't find it anymore. My dad went out and got a Casio something as a late minute replacement, and that was the calculator I used in high school and I never knew about this story. Then last year I found a Ti84 in my parents attic...

7thpower 5mo ago
Was this the first time you had realized that they did, in fact, love you the entire time?
TheMagicHorsey 5mo ago
Hahaha! This is great. Somewhat related. My mom once yelled at me for losing a necklace she really liked. Then we were moving her stuff out of her house and found the necklace behind a wardrobe, wedged between it and the wall. It had been there for like 40 years, layered in dust.
- linsomniac 5mo ago
  My mom once was getting ready for work and I hear a pop and hear my mom yelling. I go in and her necklace fell off the dresser; a "dust buster" wall wart was plugged in back there and it fell across the prongs, shorting it out.
  - jkubicek 5mo ago
    This is why you always mount outlets with the grounding pin facing up!
    - cluckindan 5mo ago
      How does that help?

higgins 5mo ago

nostalgia

amelius 5mo ago

If only kids of today loved this more than their phones.

devanshranjan 5mo ago

[dead]

QuantumSeed 5mo ago

If only they would build a Ti-84 RPN, I would snap it up in a heartbeat

crispyambulance 5mo ago
Apparently, you can use it in RPN mode!

whalesalad 5mo ago

The only thing I used mine for in high school was playing Phoenix and Drug Wars.

gigatexal 5mo ago

I do have fond memories of my TI-82 (we couldn't afford the fancier 84 or 89). I wonder, though, after all these years did Texas Instruments corner the market and obtain an monopoly on allowed calculators for proctored tests or ... because it sure is a shame there's not competition here driving the cost of these things down and the features way up.

nathan_compton 5mo ago

You can claw my HP48 out of my cold, dead, hands.

j2kun 5mo ago

Python programming with 156 MHz and 3.5 MiB of RAM? Can a Python REPL even start up with that profile?

duskwuff 5mo ago
3.5 MB is pretty generous, actually! Some older TI-84 models had MicroPython running on a secondary ATSAMD21 processor with 32 KB of RAM - that was effectively unusable.

deferredgrant 5mo ago

[flagged]

jsrozner 5mo ago

I personally think this is stupid (e.g., the new interface for selecting functions). The interface on original 84 was better. I still have mine from 15 years ago. I still use it.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Beijinger 5mo ago

Simply the best: https://www.hp.com/us-en/calculators.html https://www.hp.com/us-en/calculators.html

nateburke 5mo ago

Ti-30x is all you need.

dwa3592 5mo ago

I don't get it. Who is buying these calculators nowadays? It's expensive and any plot it can generate is 1 prompt away from the AI that students are already using. Also why is there a calculator license? what even is that?

beeandapenguin 5mo ago

Q: Who else had their first exposure to programming on a Ti-83/4 calculator?

throwaway85825 5mo ago

I want a desk calculator keyboard that works with my phone. New TIs are just really cheap phones now.

legel 5mo ago

Very very warm nostalgic fuzzy feelings here

dgrin91 5mo ago

Why do you need an online calculator subscription? I can kind of get why you want a physical calculator, especially for a school environment, but why would you want a calculator online when you can just use... the rest of the web?

dbg31415 5mo ago

But no mention of the most important feature… I just need to know that it can still play Drug Wars.

uejfiweun 5mo ago

The Python inclusion is fascinating to me. I, like many other kids in the US, did a lot of calculator programming with the TI-84 back in school. It definitely taught me the basics in a way that made my CS classes much easier. I'm jealous of the kids who now get to make that journey with Python instead of TI-Basic.

markus_zhang 5mo ago

Can we still program assembly on this one? There must be a way to hack it open.

idatum 5mo ago

Bring back the HP-10c. RPN with "scientific calculator" label. Pure and simple, and approved for testing that forbids any programmable devices. EDIT: oops, conflated with HP-35, from a decade earlier. 10c was programmable. HP-35 was not.

clamprecht 5mo ago

My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years. Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed the TI-85 so its startup screen read, "TI-85 NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR". Problem solved.

t1234s 5mo ago
You sir are the hardest person on HN
sizzle 5mo ago
How long were you locked up in the clink for? Did you get any access to computers there? How did your time there affect you or change how you think? Thanks for sharing
- postalcoder 5mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht
  - lioeters 5mo ago
    > First person banned from the Internet Legend.
    - alterom 5mo ago
      Indeed.
- owenpalmer 5mo ago
  70 months, or 5.83 years
- clamprecht 5mo ago

racl101 5mo ago

That is the coolest graphing calculator I've ever seen.

easygenes 5mo ago

This has me pining for a future professional class CAS 3d graphing calculator. I'm thinking something that could be a major upgrade in spirit to the long-in-the-tooth (released a decade ago) Casio FX-CG500. Could use the soon to be released ARM C-1 Nano and Pro cores in an SoC with stacked 2GB LPDDR4, USB-C charging to a large battery, high-res transflective LCD... Mockup "AxiomPad Pro X1": https://enia.cc/out/axiompad-cas-mock.png https://enia.cc/out/axiompad-cas-mock.png

Centigonal 5mo ago

Great memories writing games in TI-BASIC on sheets of loose-leaf paper to later transcribe manually into my TI-84+.

intrasight 5mo ago

I didn't have a calculator until my senior year of highschool. But since we weren't alliwed to use them in tests, I didn't feel like I was missing anything. As an engineering student at CMU, I had an HP 15c like everyone else. A few years back when I found out they are coveted, I sold mine on ebay. I have an emulator on my phone. I assume that calculators will continue to evolve and that my grandchildren will have a Propædeutic Enchiridion.

wg0 5mo ago

It's a beautiful device so much that hacker inside me wants to poke into what CPU they have and design a similar one in Verilog myself then put it on FPGA with similar display and it's driver then a 3D printed case and keys too.

collinmanderson 5mo ago

Shout out to https://ticalc.org/ https://ticalc.org/ - the design is pretty much unchanged.

j_m_b 5mo ago

Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these. I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.

schaefer 5mo ago

I'll take my father's HP 49g to my grave. but if TI wanted to flirt with me, all it would take is a setting to enable Reverse Polish Notation. (I did check the features, and no mention).

shostack 5mo ago

My ti-82/83 got me into programming because I hated math so much that I taught myself to code an app that would help walk me through how to do various problems. I got in trouble but it was worth it. Also, drug wars, x wing vs tie fighter, and all sorts of other awesome games were definitely the fun thing to do with these.

kenjackson 5mo ago

Who is using this on the SAT when there is Desmos?

LeFantome 5mo ago

How are these still so slow?

wolfi1 5mo ago

Do these graphing calculators still use Derive (tm)? pity, there is no pc version anymore

aggregator-ios 5mo ago

I was introduced to the 83 Plus and it was simply the most mindblowing device at the time. We were given a sheet to share with our parents on why it was an important device to own/borrow. Me and several friends would trade apps through the TI-Link cable, and we would play games, write software for it and there was even a popularity rank in school about whose program was installed on more calculators. For a lot of people it introduced them to TI-Basic which was quite capable, and for others you could get into Assembly which allowed for more powerful applications. There were 2 parts of the memory, BASIC programs were in regular memory that could be easily erased, and another part which was Flash Apps. I later upgraded to the 89 which had a better CPU, screen resolution and processing power and it was phenomenal in helping me understand every single math class, including EE/EECS. It made me sad to see them banned in exams, because having a 83+/89/any calculator was in no way helpful in any of the exams I took, but it was more of a "control the students" thing in college. The Math department determined that because they couldn't prove that people were not using the internet/portable PC's in their calculators, that they could not guarantee the fairness of it all. Weird argument to make knowing that a 20 year old student was engineering a full internet capable PC into a calculator at the time would have been the envy of the world (and every engineering program). This all depends on the quality of education and not simply handing out problems that require rote memorization of the methods to solve an equation and instead derive or figure out the equation yourself after understanding the problem after which you're free to use the calculator to "plug and chug".

CephalopodMD 5mo ago

Wasting time making games on my TI84 in the back of middle school geometry taught me how to program.

jedberg 5mo ago

Summary of the comments in here: * I used the programming functionality of the calculator to get around the rules * I didn't care much for the math, but my TI calculator was my first programming experience and it's what got me to love programming My experience is similar. We were allowed to use our TI-85s in class, but we had to go up to the teacher before the test and show him that we were running a factory reset, to prove we had nothing programmed in it to cheat. My buddy and I had made a two player blackjack game and didn't want to have to retype it after every test. So instead we made a program that mimicked the factory reset process. You would run the program before walking up tot he front. The only indication something was different was the three little dots in the corner indicating a programming was running, but we just covered that with our thumbs. Ironically we never used it to cheat, only to not erase our game that we programmed!

fudged71 5mo ago
I wonder how many of us had the exact same experience (down to those damn three little dots!)
donatj 5mo ago
Our study hall in Junior High would wipe your calculator as you signed in to ensure you weren't playing games, god forbid. I would claim not to have my calculator, and often not do my math homework in study hall just to avoid getting my calculator wiped.
move-on-by 5mo ago
My experience is not much different then what you listed, except I discussed programming with my math teacher. She said as long as I was the one who programmed it, and that I didn’t share the program with anyone else, the I could use it. Looking back on that experience, I’m very grateful to her, but she also probably didn’t realize I was programming it to also show the individual ‘steps’ to get the solution instead of just the solution.

genxy 5mo ago

price, 165$ which is ridiculous for a device that costs them less than 20$ to build.

poink 5mo ago

As someone who built a custom serial cable (not my idea, greetz to the original designer) to load assembly programs on TI-85s for all my friends, the “approved for exams” shit is so funny

kernz 5mo ago

Classic hacker mindset - the rule said no programmable calculators, so you made it say it wasn't one. Security through labeling.

snvzz 5mo ago

TI calculators peaked with TI-89/92/v200. Functionality, low latency UX, long battery life. These are still readily available in the second hand market, at very reasonable pricing (thanks to them selling well back then). Unfortunately, ever since, they seem to have decided to imitate smartphones and focus on making restricted devices for exam taking, rather than tools to empower the user.

trelliumD 5mo ago

the best calculator is of course a RPN calculator, preferably a HP 48GX, but HP Prime also suffices. Swissmicros DM42N is a good second :-)

trelliumD 5mo ago

HP48GX rules, HP Prime is a solid second. SwissMicros DM42N is a solid third.

natas 5mo ago
I don't have a prime, but agreed on 48gx + dm42n without a doubt. I'd add the 50g as another contender, doesn't depend so much on external memory cards (which have the tendency to fail) and is fairly aligned with the 48/49 line.

aarc 5mo ago

I still have my TI-83 plus. It's been with me for 25 years now! I've always kept it on my desk, despite the fact that I engraved 'KoЯn' on cover when I was 13 or 14.

rgovostes 5mo ago

In high school I had the TI-89 Titanium. Like everyone here, I got into programming it using some USB adapter I could attach to my iMac G5 and the TI Connect app[0]. One day, vexed by something, I vented my frustration by composing a profanity-laced rant into the Feedback window of the TI Connect app. (I don't recall the proximate cause, but I remember complaining that the product itself, which is still $110 today, is a total ripoff.) I was certainly surprised when the (sole?) TI Connect developer responded by e-mail taking umbrage at my complaints. 0: https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-connect-sw https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-co...

saagarjha 5mo ago
I just put up with TiLP which I somehow figured out how to build on macOS. I think I still have cruft from that attempt on my machine years later somewhere

alter_igel 5mo ago

I used to doodle and make pixel art on my TI 84+ in high school. I'd spend entire classes just clicking left, right, up, down, and enter to move and toggle individual pixels with a simple program I'd written. https://timstr.website/artwork/ti84plus.html https://timstr.website/artwork/ti84plus.html

Surac 5mo ago

To bad it is still made for pupils and not engineers. I tried using it for computer science and math and it lost to a Casio

itrunsdoomguy 5mo ago

Does it run Doom?

biosboiii 5mo ago

I find it interesting that TI still seems to use custom ASIC chips for their calculators. Any MCU out of their portfolio should be fully capable of driving the display, reading the keyboard. And the math should be lightweight for even the smallest processors nowadays.

xvilka 5mo ago

Does it still use Zilog eZ80 (Z80-family, 24-bit) as the main CPU?

baalimago 5mo ago

Conclusion from reading HN comments: very few used the calculator to actually calculate anything

a96 5mo ago
Wouldn't be hacking to use things for their intended purpose.

wiz21c 5mo ago

I use Qalculate! quite a lot (but for rather simple things). However, I miss the "physical" aspect of having real buttons. How woud this Ti-84 Evo compare ? https://qalculate.github.io/ https://qalculate.github.io/

lqstuart 5mo ago

I had a TI-89 in high school. I was that kid.

cbondurant 5mo ago

Personally, I don't think I have much benefit in a new generation TI-84. I still own a TI-85, a model that was discontinued before I was born, and it is still an objectively superior tool for doing small calculations than any other alternative. For instance, we compare the phone calculator. My phone fills a lot of really important roles besides being a calculator, ones that necessitate a password. So first I have to unlock my phone. Then I have to leave whatever app I had open before. Then I need to find the damn calculator app. That's 5-6 seconds of friction, depending on how responsive my phone feels like being and how many times I fatfinger my password because the concept of "muscle memory" on a touch screen is practically an oxymoron. Not to mention, you cant just walk away from the desk for a moment with the calculator app left open on your phone, ready to come back at a moments notice, like you can with a dedicated calculator. Phones are just too important for that. There's arguable pros and cons to using your PC over a calculator, but I think that discussion is a lot more nuanced. Either way, a PC is definitely less portable than your phone or a calculator. Maybe I'll be convinced to upgrade at whatever point they add usb-c and a rechargeable battery to their lowest trim model. Not before that though.

charles_f 5mo ago

It runs python!? I still have my ti89, and my brother's 83. My kids will learn to write text based dealer simulation in ti-basic, then 68k assembly, like real men^. ^ they're boys so that cliche works

corvad 5mo ago

The UI reminds me quite a bit like https://www.numworks.com/calculator/apps/ https://www.numworks.com/calculator/apps/

xyproto 5mo ago

I wonder why they don't have a "Buy now" button on their website.

thatoneengineer 5mo ago

I see we've finally progressed beyond https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/, in specs if not in functionality or price point.

fithisux 5mo ago

This is a very useful gadget and without any AI

joncooper 5mo ago

I'm an HP-12C guy since working on a trading desk and have 2 of the OG bronze colored ones and 2 of the HP-12C Platinum that are faster and silvery. But since I've been re-learning math with Math Academy I'm drawn to pick this puppy up. Should I be looking at an HP equivalent, though, since I'm an RPN convert?

kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 5mo ago

I love that the first thing I see in the website (at least on mobile) is "Approved for exams", as if there was some other reason one would be forced to buy those pieces of garbage.

rldjbpin 5mo ago

crazy to see the og 84 plus still shown in the comparison, still unchanged from all these years! do they only refer to the web app whenever they mention "online" as an adjective for the calculator? just a weird situation to be in. given the MASSIVE margin they got selling these, i really wish they had an eink display. given the performance characteristics it would have been a great fit imho.