TI-84+C-Silver Edition: That C Stands For Color

skade88 writes "Do you remember those large TI-8X line of calculators with a BW display from when you were growing up and learning all about math? Yeah well, you can still get them because TI has yet to update or change their line of TI-8X calculators from their 96x64 display, processors designed in the 1980s with just a few kilobytes of user accessible memory. They still cost in the $100.00 to $150.00 range. That is all about to change now that the TI-8X line of calculators is 22 years old. Their new TI-84+C-Silver edition will come with a 320x240 16-bit color display, 3.5MB of flash ROM, and 21KB of RAM. Ars has a good preview of the device along with speculation on why it took so so so very long for TI to finally bring calculators up to a level of technology that could have been delivered a decade ago."Last month some photos and a few details of the new TI-84+C were leaked.

Comments

Ti-84

[sheehaje]

Seen the ti-84 mentioned a lot lately... The only thing I remember was I could program it, and my professor let me for my Calculus 1 class. I still don't know a lot about Calculus, but I know more about programming... Makes me think if calculators are good for learning the subject, or for learning how to program the subject.

Re:Ti-84

[bmo]

>The only thing I remember was I could program it, and my professor let me for my Calculus 1 class. I still don't know a lot about Calculus, but I know more about programming...

Actually, you know more about calculus than you think you do. In order to write a program, you must understand what the algorithm does that you're using.

That is if you wrote the program from scratch instead of simply plugging things in from a cookbook.

--
BMO

Re:Ti-84

[vlm]

Actually, you know more about calculus than you think you do. In order to write a program, you must understand what the algorithm does that you're using.

Unfortunately, the algorithms I used on my TI-81 were more like, "crude text adventure parser" (stereotypical DnD dungeon) "parametric equation of a side view of a boob" (boys will be boys) and in later years when I had a HP-48 I wrote a pretty decent 68hc11 simulator using an array as memory and variables as the registers. Welcome to state machines! The '48 had pretty good hex math capabilities and I never implemented the whole instruction set, but I certainly had the basic load, store, add, branch type stuff and a crude debugger UI that could show contents of registers and memory and single step etc. My microcontroller instuctor was somewhat impressed. Also in high school I did learn a fair amount of trig on my own as I finally got a working 3d cube render-er which was a pretty stereotypical 80s home computer BASIC challenge. Basically you store the 3-d cube as an array of the corners coordinates and then plot them ignoring the Z coord, then execute a transform on all the points (there are several ways to implement this), replot, run the transform, replot, you end up with a little controllable rotating cube. Without double (triple?) buffering the flashing as it redraws is almost unbearable and you have to have a strategy to depend with floating point rounding (like not rotating the existing cube by 1 degree each time, you rotate a unit cube by a continuously varying angle (like 41 degrees X rotation this time, 42 the next etc). Its quite slow on a TI-81 but watchable and interesting from a demo-scene perspective.

I learned calc in my senior year of HS anyway, but it was much more despite having a graphing calc than because I had a graphing calc.

So this is what kids do with their "valuable educational math tools" instead of whatever curriculum the PR firm releases. Its more or less the college prep kids equivalent of when the shop kids make bongs in class instead of birdfeeders.

Forgetting something?

[diamondmagic]

"Educators simply weren’t asking for them until recently... We don’t want to create technology for technology’s sake"

Translation: "We haven't the slightest clue what the word innovation means or why it's important."

Re:Forgetting something?

[Gamer_2k4]

"Educators simply weren’t asking for them until recently... We don’t want to create technology for technology’s sake"

Translation: "We haven't the slightest clue what the word innovation means or why it's important."

Innovation is the devil when it comes to this sort of thing. The article made the excellent point that TI calculators are approved for standardized testing due to their readily-known constraints. What's the point of releasing a new model every year when students won't be able to use them on the important things?

Re:Forgetting something?

[diamondmagic]

Don't get me wrong, I love my TI-89.

But the very-dark-green-on-dark-green is damned impossible to read in anything except exceptionally well lit rooms, and entering functions isn't even half as quick as it could be. Its whole directory/namespace system is uninspired, and reading input/output from functions is bizarre. There's no easy way to get the argument list of a function without consulting the catalog, which forces you to scroll through all its hundreds of functions or so, and even then it's not very informative (the TI-84 is way better at this even). And so on.

Yes, you can have innovation. The whole point of innovation is to make people's lives easier in ways they couldn't have otherwise anticipated.

Re:Forgetting something?

[tangelogee]

What's wrong with way better? It's informal usage.

Is much better miles better than way better?

greatly so.

Re:Forgetting something?

[tangelogee]

because you cannot easily prevent a student from cheating with a phone that has outside access to the internet, messaging, etc. The calculators could not talk to each other (without a blatantly obvious cable).

Re:Forgetting something?

[omnichad]

Translation: "We can still charge a fortune for old technology as long as nobody asks for anything better"

Specs, still

[93 Escort Wagon]

A couple years ago I bought an LG Thrive on a prepaid plan - so undiscounted - for about $150 I believe. The phone was not great, but it had 256 megs of useable RAM, a 320x480 color screen, and a 600MHz processor... not to mention the hardware one expects from any smartphone (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3G, GPS, low-end camera).

So how can TI get away with charging almost that much today for a single-purpose device that doesn't even compare favorably with a low-end smartphone from two years ago? Does it serve as an espresso machine too, or maybe as an electric razor?

Re:Specs, still

[Pseudonym]

So how can TI get away with charging almost that much today for a single-purpose device that doesn't even compare favorably with a low-end smartphone from two years ago?

Because designed to be brought into closed-book examinations can't be Internet-enabled general-purpose computers. And they cost so much because they're single-use devices.

Re:Specs, still

[TubeSteak]

So how can TI get away with charging almost that much today for a single-purpose device that doesn't even compare favorably with a low-end smartphone from two years ago?

A. Calculators are built to be abused by students and a ruggedized cell phones is pricey
B. TI can charge whatever they want because they're a defacto monopoly. The text books are literally written with how-to sections for TI calculators.

There's the Nspire lineup which has more features and whatnot, but it's still woefully underpowered and underfeatured compared to a smart phone from 5 years ago.

Re:Specs, still

[phantomfive]

So how can TI get away with charging almost that much today for a single-purpose device that doesn't even compare favorably with a low-end smartphone from two years ago?

Because these calculators are allowed to be used during the test at schools. Their lack of functionality is a benefit. If you bring your phone in, you could use it to find other answers. These devices don't even compare favorably to the Palm Pilot1000 from 1996, although those cost $200 more.

In the testing centers at a lot of universities, the proctors know how to erase the ti-85 before you enter the testing center. Or they can loan you one to use for the test.

Re:Specs, still

[runeghost]

RPN. Also, speaking for myself, I far prefer actual buttons to poking at a touchscreen.

Re:Specs, still

[Firehed]

They cost so much because they're devices that are the only accepted model for school use. If someone made an equivalent and sold it for $50, TI wouldn't drop the price because the equivalent hadn't been certified as acceptable for test-taking.

Of course the whole thing is absurd. Algebraic solvers aside, being able to plug numbers into a calculator is all you'll be doing with one outside of very specific fields. Memorizing formulae is totally unnecessary, although knowing which one to use is important - and a calculator isn't going to solve that (Wikipedia or Google, on the other hand...)

I'm more surprised that there aren't decent graphic calculator apps for smartphones. I get the whole thing with physical buttons (and agree), but the last time I had to actually graph an equation I think I had to use excel or some janky web app because that's not in my day-to-day work so I don't have my old TI-83+ sitting around from high school.

Re:Specs, still

[Firehed]

I've never managed to kill a calculator (graphing or otherwise) and it was definitely put through some abuse during high school. I wasn't exactly throwing it against walls, but I wasn't terribly careful about throwing it in a backpack containing thirty pounds of textbooks either. There were a thousand or more of them at the school as every student had one, and I can't once remember overhearing someone complaining about a cracked or otherwise damaged calculator. Yet at least a third of the iPhones I see are cracked in some way (oddly, this doesn't seem to be the case with many Androids, but I see far fewer of them so that might just be selection bias)

Re:Specs, still

[Iskender]

So how can TI get away with charging almost that much today for a single-purpose device that doesn't even compare favorably with a low-end smartphone from two years ago? Does it serve as an espresso machine too, or maybe as an electric razor?

The TI doesn't need to and shouldn't get into a feature or spec sheet race. It's a mobile calculator and that's what it should do well. It compares very favourably with a smartphone if we actually consider what it's for.

I haven't had a serious use for my TI since upper secondary school, yet I still prefer it to any option. In more than a decade of owning it I've changed the batteries something like twice. Some smartphones on the other hand need charging twice a week even for standby.

I still have the interface in muscle memory after all these years. A smartphone would have died within this timespan, likely forcing an interface change. You cannot do touchtyping on a smartphone like you can on a TI. There's no way you'll have 30-40 always available hotkeys either.

Basically as long as it's within the budget the TI is superior for these tasks. That's why smartphones won't replace it. But it IS indeed overpriced - as someone else said, it's not known why there isn't competition pulling prices down (I write this assuming similar calculators from other manufacturers have roughly similar prices).

But until the prices fall you need to pay this to get a good device. The options will either be bulky (laptop), or run out of batteries and have worse interfaces. A low cost integrated camera won't get the job done.

Re:Specs, still

[thegarbz]

While I agree with your anecdote, the AC has a point. There's nothing in them to break. The buttons are standard keyboard style PCB traces with a rubberised bit of conductive material floating above them, the screen is a stock standard LCD, and the microcontroller is a little epoxy blob. But calling them ruggedized is disingenuous. You may as well call every old bit of electronics ruggedized.

There is nothing in them that's ruggedized and that can not remotely justify the price you pay for them. And on that note there is absolutely no reason why your cellphone can't be "ruggedized" in exactly the same way. Those calculator screens wouldn't stand to even the slightest impact if it weren't for that fold back clip down abs plastic case that gets put over them.

No one is suggesting you have to build the damn thing out of glass in a way that you can't attach a protective cover ala iPhone 4. But how about a higher resolution (not even bigger) screen with some colour and a damn processor that's worth something? Rip off the binary blob and put a decent processor in them, and sell it for what it's really worth ($40 not taking into account economies of scale, and $35 of those is the screen in hobby electronics prices).

Re:Specs, still

[saihung]

Amen. My HP 48GX made the TI look like a toy.

Re:Specs, still

[LoRdTAW]

The best math professor I had in college let us take a page of notes to an exam. He stated that its more important for us to understand the steps to solving a problem rather than memorizing a formula that can be easily looked up. And he was absolutely right because that was the first math class that I received an A+; 96%+ on every exam. And I came out with an excellent understanding of the material. Someone may think "hey, that's cheating!" But think about it for a moment, how is jotting down formulas and some notes on how to apply them cheating? If you don't understand the material how do you know which notes to make or how to apply the formulas? You wouldn't. And you would fail the exam.

More kids would benefit if teachers stopped with the bull shit rote learning of formulas and instead taught the kids how to use them. Its easy to bomb a test because you forgot its -b +- and not b +- or b^2-4ac and not b^2 + 4ac in the quadratic formula. Or that sine is opposite over hypotenuse and not adjacent over hyp. Basic trig and algebra are what usually scare kids away from math because of stupid shit like that. And its a shame because they form the foundation for advanced fields such as engineering and physics.

Re:Specs, still

[nayrbn]

I agree the quadratic formula is not that important to memorize for the majority of math students. Completing the square is good enough, at any rate, and that's how you come up with the quadratic formula anyways. However, knowing the difference between sin and cos is more basic and more fundamental. If you can't remember them, then you probably don't understand the unit circle and that x goes with cosine and y with sin, and that is conceptually an important understanding.

Re:Specs, still

[AmiMoJo]

Speaking of LCDs one of the reasons they suck so much is long term availability. If you want to build the same product for 5+ years you have to choose parts that will be available for that long. The kinds of LCDs you get in phones tend to only be available in very large quantities for a few years max, then you come out with a new model using the latest and greatest display.

We had this problem at work when creating a hand-held data readback device. I wanted a nice large full colour touch screen like my phone, but the best anyone could do was 3 year availability. I'd have gone with it anyway, but was overruled and ended up with a black and white one from the mid 90s that will be around forever and has multiple sources.

Approved lists

[ableal]

You have to consider what it means for a calculator to be on approved lists for school systems all over the world.

You do not mess with that lightly.

Re:Approved lists

[Radak]

This is exactly right. The reason the TI-8x line has been around unchanged for so long is because school systems find it sufficient, but not too much, and teachers know exactly how to reset its memory. If you let kids start using whatever software they want on their smartphones, cheating would become much more widespread than it is now. When I was in high school, I used a HP 48S (still do from time to time) and I could have cheated my pants off with that if I wanted to, as the teachers didn't have a clue about it. (I didn't, but easily could have--more important to have things like Ant in my RAM!)

Re:Approved lists

[Firehed]

Is using Google really cheating? That's exactly what you're going to do outside of a school if you don't know how to come up with the answer.

It's important that students understand fundamentals but to be honest anything beyond basic algebra is going to be useless for most people. Even as a software engineer, I use "advanced" math... never. For people wanting to go into careers that require that kind of stuff, they should take those classes or pick it up during an internship.

Then again, that applies to basically every subject. It's good to push slightly advanced stuff so students can find what they like and find enjoyably challenging to pursue it further (I took a lot of bio-type classes, remember none of it, and have used it precisely zero times outside of a classroom), but there's a point past a certain baseline when it's just going to frustrate people and take their time away from subjects that could actually turn into careers.

Re:Approved lists

[thegarbz]

For people wanting to go into careers that require that kind of stuff, they should take those classes or pick it up during an internship.

They have those already. It's called a PhD. Every other degree exists to give you a basic grounding of all principles involved. I like your ideal but the reality is that the modern form of a career means you change jobs and specialties every 5 minutes. If you asked me a year ago if I were doing functional safety I would have said "Fucntional what?" If you asked me 3 years ago if I was going to work in the oil and gas industry I would have said no I much prefer micro electronics. And if you asked me in university if I ever thought I'd use an integral in my job, I'd have said hell no.

That's the problem. You don't know what you don't know, and how do you know that in 5 years from now you won't get a lucrative job offer working for some software company that develops simulation software suddenly making advanced maths a core skill of yours?

If we really got to pick our subjects in a way that made them only relevant for the jobs we were planning to get we'd find ourselves entrapped in one job. Kind of like our grandparents where career meant working for the same company in the same role for 20 years.

21 KB RAM

[timeOday]

These days it's kind of hard to wrap your head around just how little 21 Kilobytes of RAM is. You laptop or desktop has about 8 GB RAM, which is 400,000 times 21 KB. Put another way, 8GB RAM costs $40; at that rate, the RAM for 10 of these calculators would cost 1 cent.

Re:21 KB RAM

[TheGratefulNet]

take a trip to arduino land where you get 16k or 32k for program space (in bytes).

turns out I was able to get about 10k lines of C (mixed c++) inside an arduino 328 32k flash chip.

but when you run out, its a hard-stop and you KNOW it. oh boy, do you know it. virtual memory? what's that.

Re:21 KB RAM

[ratbag]

The following assumes you were making a serious point - a self-inflicted "whooosh!" if you weren't.

Power, in this context, is relative. The power of the electronic calculator is obviously portability combined with immediacy. The resolution of which you speak so proudly came with a form factor that was inappropriate for putting in your pocket (unless you've got seriously baggy cargo pants on with room for a small CRT, a power supply, and a tape player or perhaps a microdrive).

The Spectrum's handling of maths from complex numbers upwards was also a little challenging (write your own routines from scratch).

Program retention was limited at launch time to saving to audio tape, which again hampered portability and also meant you couldn't just switch it on, factor a polynomial and get on with your life.

Horses for courses etc., and I don't think anyone would advocate using a ZX for maths, any more than you'd use a TI (or an HP) to learn BASIC programming (basic programming maybe, but not BASIC).

Where can you even find components like that?

[dargaud]

I mean, I build embedded systems and we have problems _finding_ components so archaic. Where do they find them, I wonder.

Re:Where can you even find components like that?

[makapuf]

Yeah, how could a major semiconductor firm which is deeply in embedded electronics find chips ? Mystery ...

What?

[JWW]

Back in my day we didn't have this fancy TI-84 stuff. We had our RPN HP calculators and we liked them just fine.

Oh, and get off my lawn ;-)

When you are the market....

[bobjr94]

I guess you can get away with charging $150 for something worth about $35. Same as having to buy a college text book for $235 that's worth about $40. For $135 you can get a 3DS or a cheap android from a pre-paid carrier with a 800-1000mhz cpu and 8GB ram. 3.5MB flash rom ? A 4GB micro sd costs about 6$ now ?

Teaching with calculators

[sgunhouse]

I was teaching when the original TI-83 came out - the earlier 81 and 85 came out while I was in college. At the university I taught at, we actually required students to have a graphing calculator for certain classes.

At the college level. it isn't hard for a good teacher (or textbook) to ask questions that actually test the student and not the calculator - at least, unless they have one of those algebraic calculators. Even then, things like word problems require them to identify the right formula and set it up properly (which is more important than actually being able to grind out the numerical answer from there).

Having said that, I'm not sure how some elementary school teacher is supposed to teach fractions when even fairly basic calculators can handle fractions these days (some even displaying the result as you'd write it on paper). Require students to have a specific level of calculator for each grade? I'm sure that would go over really well with parents ...

Of course, I already have one of the Casio CG-10 calculators.

Re:Teaching with calculators

[NJRoadfan]

My college Calculus and Pre-Calculus courses prohibited calculators of any form. You really didn't need them as the courses were geared towards problem solving and not pure arithmetic.

Day Late and a Dollar Short

[Zero_DgZ]

I remember back when the TI-83 "boom" was happening in public schools around here and math textbooks were starting to show up with content in them tailored to TI-83 calculators. Suddenly, it was required that students have "a graphing calculator" for math courses, on pain of automatic failure. I'm not sure how this happened but I imagine it involved large sums of money changing hands: Somehow, every single published textbook was chock full of key-by-key instructions on how to solve problems that applied ONLY to TI-8x series calculators, and none other. Never were the concepts behind the button presses explained, it was just a matter of "press this button, then this button, then enter your value, then press this button..." So, while the schools were not able to admit that what you really needed was a TI-83 calculator and none other without exception, that's really what this new policy meant. In the early days, most primary school teachers didn't have much experience working with these "newfangled" calculators and were not able to offer assistance or background explanation about any of these button-pressing procedures, so the lucky ducklings with non-TI calculators (like me!) were basically shit outta luck. I had, and still have, a Casio CFX-8950GB Plus, which was at the time and still is superior to the TI-83 line in every possible way. It also has a color screen, but owing to the times it can only do four colors. Even still.

However the heck this twisted situation came about, it meant that TI wound up with a near-monopoly on the graphing calculator market, considering the lion's share of that market is mandatory primary education, most of it in public schools (this is in the USA, mind you). So, they've been able to churn out basically the same calculator pretty much without change or improvement and charge the same price for it at retail. I'll bet you a nickel it's a shitton cheaper for TI to manufacture a TI-83 now, with it's tiny simple processor and chunky low-rez monochrome screen than it was back in the early '90's. I'll bet the damn thing prints money for them.

Meanwhile, the rest of the market (and the world) innovates, improves, and moves on. This move to stick a 320x240 screen and a "whopping" 21k of RAM would be a bold and exciting one if it happened 15 years ago. Somehow, I picture today's students failing to get excited about a machine that's considerably less capable than a low-end current smartphone. Hell, I have a first- or second-generaton PocketPC PDA that's more powerful than that.

I predict that this machine will cost just as much if not more than the old calculators, the old style calculators will stay on the market as a "budget" option for poor kids but their price will not drop much or at all (especially if the zooty color model costs considerably more than the current price point), and nobody who isn't forced to buy one as the particular calculator for a particular math course will care; From a functional standpoint, as opposed to your specific "press this button" classroom requirements, better tools are already available elsewhere and will continue to be.

the point of a graphing calculator?

[Gothmolly]

We did math the old fashioned way, with a "scientific" calculator, and did the graphs by hand using colored pencils. But I guess nothing of importance was created before the invention of the graphing calculator.

root it and go to jail

[decora]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_signing_keys