Why Graphing Calculators Still Cost So Much
This article doesn't actually directly address the question in the title. It observes that Texas Instruments calculators are still in wide use (due to network effects and some specific advantages over competing technologies), and that the calculators are a very high profit-margin product for TI. What I find somewhat more interesting is that TI is evidently in a monopoly position and has no real incentive to seriously lower prices or to produce a new, cheaper, and improved version of their baseline model.
I also find it interesting how relatively little attention is given to the advantage of tactile buttons:
> Plus, she says, her kids love the fact that the calculators are clunky and tactile, an opinion anyone who misses the tactile, QWERTY keyboards of earlier smartphones shares. > "The learning curve is higher, but the buttons... they love pushing 'em," Yenca said.
Frankly, I've never seen a touchscreen interface for anything that could effectively compete with a well-designed physical interface for experienced users. Touchscreens are excellent for their flexibility but have serious drawbacks when used over a long period of time, when precision is paramount, or when there is a large space of inputs.
What's really needed is more or less the same physical input layout but with a larger, high-resolution screen. I would think the market in the US is sufficiently large that even if TI doesn't see the need to produce newer, cheaper and improved models, there's space for another player, say from China, to produce a better product.
Because you can't text questions for outside help or use a general problem solving app on a graphing calculator. These are safe for exams.
While I agree that it's ridiculous that this is the case, I side with the students who were given a choice and chose the physical calculator. The thought of doing Numerical Analysis problems and long calculations on an app sounds excruciating, and I know that Accounting classes would have taken an order of magnitude longer without tactile feedback.
The replacement for a $100 problem is to buy students iPads and use an app and touchscreen? That's not a viable solution whatsoever for the vast majority of schools. The real solution is for schools to simply advocate using a cheaper and similarly functioned calculator. I used a Casio EL531 all through school and college and while it didn't graph, it covered me for everything in an Engineering degree.
Can anyone suggest a viable alternative for the TI graphing calculator? A mobile app would be great, but the ones I tried from the app store were pretty awful.
So far the best affordable alternative I've tried is... a TI calculator emulator. Which requires a ROM dumped from a TI calculator.
I quickly tried out the Desmos webapp suggested in the article, but it's rather basic and while it might work for a high school student, it's not a serious tool for scientific and engineering work that the TI can be. It does pretty plots but that's about it (I generally use gnuplot for that, and it has more useful tools than Desmos has, albeit a bit difficult to use and discover).
Back in my high school days, I was pretty bad ass with the TI-85 graphing calculator, to the point that I felt like cheating because I could easily use it to solve and verify most exercises and exams. I could have learned a whole lot more maths had I not had such a powerful calculator. And it wasn't even one of the fancy symbolic calculators that high school kids these days have.
The last time I put my TI through its paces was in university orbital mechanics class where I used it to do initial orbit determination of an asteroid based on three observations. That wouldn't have been possible without a powerful calculator, with variables in memory and such.
These days my calculator has fallen into disuse because I need it so irregularly that I don't have a good reason to carry it around. But it would be great to have something as powerful in my pocket at all times.
If I ever find the time to mature KnightOS [1] to a state that's usable for the classroom, I hope to make my next project a calculator whose hardware is open source that can be sold for much cheaper, running KnightOS.
Everybody says that this is because of their country niceties to the American school board association or whatever it is called.
If that's the reason, why is it used in the rest of the world?i had to get one too for high school in Denmark.
In 1993 I bought an HP48 for high school trig and calc. The TI-81 was pretty pathetic, and I think it didn't do calculus. The other HP user in my school didn't know the difference and probably didn't care - her engineer dad bought her a 48. Neither of us had any problems keeping up. While our textbooks didn't feature the TI, the instructors did, with a special version that was usable with an overhead projector.
I still have my HP48 on my desk and use it every day. I wonder how many of the other kids even care about the devices they had in high school.
A lot of the options kicked around are tablets running some app. Most suffer from some combination of these problems:
1) Unproven and unfamiliar software: the TI calculator OS just works, no crashes or bugs to really speak of especially in the simpler 83/84 models. (Though there are some in the 89 where you start to get into symbolic solvers and dealing with infinities.) Teachers and resource makers have also had a lot of time to create and learn materials for the older calculators.
2) Power: Calculators really sip power compared to any modern touch screen devices and with AAA batteries as the power your just a few seconds to go from a dead calculator (assuming you didn't bother to replace the batteries in the multiple days that the warning kept popping up) to a working device again. They also last much longer than any tablet out there and the batteries don't degrade in performance over time.
3) Physical interfaces vs touchscreen: There's a lot to be said for physical interfaces in speed and accuracy and the feedback they give. I've found them faster & more accurate in a lot of cases.
4) Admin overhead: This falls a bit under the unproven part of (1) but is a bit broader. Locking the tablets down and making sure that they're running just the base software and cannot communicate during tests is massively harder with a tablet alternative. Graphic calculators can be reset to factory default in well under a minute and it's difficult to put much in there beyond simple plug and solve programs to begin with. Plus free isolation because (generally, newer models like the NSpire are an exception) they can't communicate wirelessly to begin with.
None of these are necessarily show stoppers in and of themselves but they're a pretty high ramp for any competitor to top.
I've never found much use for calculators. The first time through my college science and engineering classes, useful calculators didn't exist (we all used slide rules). Now, I've almost always got a laptop with me when I have work to do so the python REPL is just a few keystrokes away, and for tallying a sum of a few numbers my phone apps work great.
The worst part of working at Texas Instruments is people assuming that you have something to do with the "calculators".
Worse, the calculator is starting to show its age. "Perpendicular lines don't look perpendicular because the window is a rectangle," one Texas-based math teacher told Mic.
...what? If this isn't a misquote, I'm wondering whether it was really a math teacher they talked to.
the texas instrument is also a great tool to start programming (TI Basic and then assembly), start understanding basic concepts of what a computer can do, it is a gateway to a whole new fascinating world and i'm pretty sure that it is due to the limitation of the machine that many will want to program. sometimes old is better.
From what I heard from TI employees they don't get much profits from calculators; they produce produce them to maintain brand recognizability.
Obligatory xkcd
As a comment on the site, I accidentally scrolled "past" the end of the story (e.g. hit some arbitrary marker whilst still reading and scrolling) and was presented by a full screen popup advert saying "Since you enjoyed reading this....".
That's a new one on me, and super annoying.
Government run orgs and monopolies go hand in hand very often. Im not sure why.