TI Launches Three New Graphing Calculators

confusedneutrino writes "Texas Instruments has announced 3 new graphing calculators to be available later this year. The TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition will be available this spring and are essentially the TI-83 Plus/SE, respectively, in a new case and with USB support. (The TI-84 Plus does sport a 15 MHz processor, compared to the TI-83 Plus' 6 MHz, though.) The TI-89 Titanium will be available in the summer and features 3x the available ROM of the 'old' TI-89 and will also have USB capability. Looks to me like a Voyage 200 minus QWERTY. I personally don't feel an inclination to upgrade at all..."

Comments

TI-92

[BJZQ8]

I still love my TI-92...While in college waiting for teachers to show up, I played lots of Tetris games on Fargo, which was the assembly-language system made possible only because of a buffer underrun...

Re:TI-92

[BJZQ8]

I know you're being sarcastic, but it is interesting for one reason....IT IS HAPPENING ON A GRAPHING CALCULATOR. I am well aware of the swarms of buffer overflow exploits out there...but again, this was on a graphing calculator, and was put to good use, not DOS'ing SCO.

Why not a PDA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not a PDA that runs graphing calculator software instead?

What's the point?

[jabber01]

Is there still a niche for calculators? I mean, between engineering computers, calculation programs, and PDAs with scientific calculators in software, dedicated calculators seem to be more and more on the wane.

Sure, I keep one on my desk, both at work and at home, for incidental calculations, but any "heavy lifting" is done via spreadsheet or a quickie program, or the likes of Mathematica if you're a real freak.

So, is there still a point to "scientific calculators" which seem to be becoming PDAs with specialized keyboards, less the address book, less the calendar, with the math software in firmware.

Bordering on off-topic, but...

[Fortunato_NC]

My little bother did a steady business in TI-8x calculators during high school. Our high school required "accelerated" math students to purchase a TI-81 (or 83 or 85, whatever the "state of the art" was at the time) to use in class and on homework.

My brother would buy calculators cheap from kids at the end of school in June and sell them to the next year's students the next year for about $10 less than the school asked for the new ones. He probably made $250-$500 a year off those calculators. Not exactly chump change to a 15 year old.

Re:Common comparisons to HP not necessarily valid

[part15guy]

I cannot use any calculator besides my HP48G (aka secret weapon) any more. If I have to balance my checkbook and do not have secret weapon with me, then I do it by hand. No TI calculator will work for me.

Re:WTF?

[mritunjai]

old days ???

Dude, you're not allowed to use any programmable calculator even in post grad courses in IITs (Indian Institute of technology) even NOW... and nobody misses them.

As for problems involving them, we have something called "lab exercises" where usually a Solaris/Linux/WIndows box running MATLAB is at your disposal and you're supposed to solve some fairly "interesting" problems ;-)

Diminishing returns

[Unknown Kadath]

I don't think I'll be upgrading from my trusty TI-85. It has been dropped, kicked, and occasionally drop-kicked regularly for the past 10 years and still works perfectly. (I guess this is a plug for the 85...do they even still make it?) I have a 93 which mostly sits in a drawer. Whenever I've considered using it, I've realized that I'd be better served by a computer with a math package--bigger display, easier input, more flexible software, faster processing. So, what is the point of a 15 mHz calculator, or a USB-capable one? You don't need something like that in high school (would a student even be allowed to use one?), and you have better resources in college and in the working world.

Bet you could write some great games for these uber-calculators, though (there were already good games available for the 83/85/86/89 when I was in high school.) Which would have been all the reason I would have needed to get one, had they existed back when I needed something to keep me awake through AP Calc.

-Carolyn

Re:Common comparisons to HP not necessarily valid

[harrkev]

This does not say much...

First, it can be safely assumed that almost ALL people who use RPN also know how to use old "algebraic" calculators. Yet they still use RPN.

I do not know of ANYBODY who became proficient with RPN who prefers algebraic calculators.

The reason that RPN is dying is because HP was the only company making RPN calculators, and they are not very competetive now. You have a shelf full of calcuators, and the shiny TI machines are brand new, and at a good price. The HP one (if they have one) may have been sitting there for a while, and simply cannot compete on such things as screen resolution and memory.