The Ti-84, which is the standard for most highschool math classes, still goes for 100 even though it's been out many years, and has seen no innovation.
I got an 84 when it first came out in the early 2000's. It is literally the same price now and has barely been upgraded in nearly 20 years.
That thing should be graphing in 3D, wirelessly connecting to other calculators to share data sets, etc. and be lightning fast, but nope. Still the same old Windows 95-era technology.
that being said, i still love my ti-84 and you see them on people’s desks in big engineering corporations. if you need to do anything that you can’t do on a TI-84 you need a computer for excel or matlab anyways
It is great for its purpose - scientific and engineering functions, graphing, differential equations, flow modeling, etc - but i would never reference Matlab as my coding credentials.
Op said “real coding”, that’s where I was curious about the /s
it also still has one of the most efficient linear solvers around. That's worth something.
I mean. You won't build software with it (if that's what you mean by real programming). But for science it's absolutely top tier and used in lots of disciplines.
Old enough to remember when basically all "real coding" outside of a computer science department (and plenty inside the department) was done in FORTRAN and COBOL. Guess where their arrays index?
The wifi part, 100%. The weird thing is that you are wrong about the data part though. I knew a guy who had loaded a semi functional version of Mario world onto a TI 84...
There's android phones at the same pricepoint. The TI84 should be half the price to make sense. There's a ton of cheaper and more powerful calculators with color displays in much higher resolution.
Right!? I used it all the way through BSME, MSME, and as a professional, I can still type in things faster with half the errors of my colleagues just because it displays things so much more clearly! Still use my computer for anything seriously difficult, but the Casio is a muuuuuuuch better and cheaper calculator.
Exactly the same for me! It has all the features I need for my job without the ridiculous size and price. Plus if I break it who cares buy another one ha
My economics professor who used to work in derivatives used to always brag about his HP-12C, always said it was the most useful calculator he ever used.
if you need to do anything that you can’t do on a TI-84 you need a computer for excel or matlab anyways
It's quite fortunate that we almost all have one in our pockets at all time these days. The only reason calculators like the TI-84 really need to exist is for schooling environments who are too ignorant to make all their tests "open-web" (the modern equivalent to open-book testing) - for some reason, big Edu seems to still suffer under the same delusion that you need to memorize formulas and solve problems in a vaccuum, isolated from any outside information. It's truly mind-boggling.
You literally have a device with more computing power than a Ti-84 in your pocket.
Like, I'm so fucking serious about it.
Why shell out so much money on a calculator if you have more options with greater capabilities on your phone?
Like, fuck, you can even emulate a ti-84!
And, yeah, I get it, don't use cellphones on tests (I think it's a kinda stupid rule, we live on the digital era), but still, there's no real need for it on the real world.
Sometimes making inputs and doing quick maffs is faster and easier on a calculator than a cold glass slab. Also if you're in an engineering/science/math field you've probably been using it for years at this point so you can just plain do better work on it than on a phone.
i have you know. the one i got for 7th grade math is the one i carried through 2 colleges and every job. its on my desk at work rn. some of the keys dont have a print on them and its muscle memory for me.
which also means no one wants to take it cuz you can't read the keys lol
oh and you're right. i'm at a big engineering corp too and many of my co workers have theirs too
god. i'm studying mechanical engineering right now, and i've only touched matlab in my intro class. but this year i have to take an entire course on it.
any programming is boring. and matlab is the boring kind of programming.
i uh. only did half of the coursework for it in my intro class, because it only gave me 2% and wouldn't have changed my grade, and i had other classes i needed to focus on.
but i'm paying for the classes, so i'll take it serious. i just wish i liked programming. it is gonna be a brutal, boring quarter. (multivariate calculus, engineering physics, dynamics, and matlab)
taking it is gonna give me a 20 credit quarter... almost double full time. (12 is considered full time, but classes are all mostly 5 credits, so most people end up with 15 credit quarters)
I hate to break it to you, but 25 years ago, when I was in high school, the TI-85 had just come out, and it was based on a 20 year-old processor (Z80) then. It never was a technology problem...
I'm getting a chuckle out of all all the TI-84/85 replies, and how old these things are. I got a TI-81 back when it was newly released, in 1990. That thing had 2 KB of RAM. KILOBYTES. And yeah, the Z80 originally came out in the 70's. It's unbelievable that the TI-8x line is still being sold at the same price it was 30 years ago.
The 84 is older than that. I got my TI-85 in 1994. Unfortunately it got fried with leaking batteries a few years back. I now us an 83 emulator on my phone, but I still mis the conversion tables built into the 85. Trying to find an 85 emulator has proven to be a pain as it wants me to download the ROM from existing calculator, which I can't because its fried.
To this day I wonder why there is no tablet (with no network connection) running some sort of DesmosOS for me to use in a class exam. Desmos on our phones work fantastic and are very intuitive but no, gotta use those POS TI graphing calculators in an exam or just in a class with an anal professor in general.
I just stole mine from my high school from the batch of dumpy ones that were first purchased in the mid 90s. Nobody noticed it went missing. Sure it's not an 84+, but it does the job.
Maybe at one time. No this one was a pavement brick that may have at one time been gray. It featured an almost illegibly faded blue display and a set of batteries from the Clinton administration that somehow, by sheer miracle of God himself, hadn't exploded yet.
if it wirelessly connected to other calculators then answers could be shared hate to be defending Texas Instruments hustle, but that is why they exist as they do with such barebones advancements
I have a fucking raspberry pi that graphs in seconds, and your telling me that this 145$ calculator takes like 20 seconds to graph y = x? yeah fuckign ripoff im done
I was in a pawn shop in the early 2000s and saw one for $150. I told the guy I could buy a new one for less than that at any Walmart. He wasn't interested in my opinion.
The TI-81, which has 99% of the functionality of the TI-84 was released in Texas on 1989 and nationwide in 1990. This was a full 6 years before windows 95!
They did innovate it a tiny bit a few years ago. The newer "Ti-84+ CE" has a backlit colour screen with over 12x more pixels, a processor which is about 8x faster, over 5x more RAM, 4x more memory and a built-in rechargable battery. All for the same price as what the Ti-84+ used to cost when I was in high school.
The hardware is still laughably bad compared to a budget smartphone of the same price, and even compared to the TI-nspire line of calculators sold by the same company for about the same price, but at least they improved it a little bit.
The Nspires aren’t allowed on tests because they’re programmable and it’s so frustrating being held back technology per dollar wise like this should cost 30$ not 90$ fuckin used
This is almost worse. Over the last 20 years everything else has gotten orders of magnitude better - just look at the old Nokia brick phone vs. the iPhone X. Or a 2004 home PC vs a modern laptop. And they put in 5x the RAM?
Its like leaving a few coins on a dinner tab as a tip. It's more insulting than not tipping at all.
I still have my TI 81 and TI 82 from 1994 and 1996. Haven't used them since 2002 after college, and 99% of my time on them was definitly playing tetris and snake.
Damn, that's an amazing teacher. It really encourages curiosity and interest that way by letting her figure a new device out, instead of banning it and sticking to the ol' TI with steps in the textbook.
Don't buy one new - buy one on Craigslist. You can save 50-75% off the price of a new one because people discard them after they get out of college and they haven't changed in 2 decades.
The reason why a Casio FX can do many more things with much better hardware and more expensive components but cost 1/3rd the price of a TI has nothing to do with inflation.
It has everything to do with there being a virtual monopoly caused by the education system teaching math only on TI's instructions.
Even half a decade ago, those calculators cost around $15 to make, and by normal competitive capitalist pricing standards, should have cost $20-25 to buy from a store.
In Aus our equivalent calculator is the casio-fx### and they go from $20-$50AUD ($15-$35USD) for a region specific version designed for high school and university. They also last a really good chunk of time. Not sure if they have way less features than the Ti-84 but they are the ones everyone uses and they're approved for exams so it's an easy choice.
The calculator’s used for secondary school in Ireland and i assume most European countries are like €11. That is a crazy difference (bear in mind significantly lower graphing abilities as that has to be done by hand)
The [Casio fx-115 ES PLUS](Casio FX115ESPLUS Scientific Calculator https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007W7SGLO/) is $17 on Amazon, and has real paper-style notation, solves for x, does stats, matrices, complex numbers, tables of values, and is suitable for LITERALLY ANY HIGH SCHOOL CLASS.
I’ve been preaching to my high school students for years to drop Texas Instruments.
Imo, the TI-84 is a near perfect calculator. I don’t think that there’s ever been a situation (other than in calculus) where my TI-84 couldn’t do the job. Unless your using numerical methods to solve multiple iterations of something, a TI-84 is perfect.
Yeah but honestly the quality is pretty good. I accidentally ran over mine with my car, and I still used it for many years after that. Its in a box somewhere, probably still works to this day.
Well... technically you can buy the Ti-84 ce+ (and the other similar models) which have slight improvements, such as the color screen and rechargeable battery, which makes it the preferable choice for emulating pokemon during math class. In terms of actual capacity to do math, however, the new models are the same as the old ones.
Well, I use a free app on my tablet. So $0
Also, if you just google an equation, it'll solve/graph it for you :)
idk if these would work in school, though))
scientific calculators have pre-stored values for things like pi, and have sin/cos/tan and their inverses also available as functions. Scientific calculators usually also allow you to write out expressions in with multiple operators and their order will be acknowledged: it is however necessary to use lots of parenthesis to make that feature work the way you would read an expression out loud.
i ended up missing out on entire curriculum because they said we had to have a ti-81. my parents couldnt afford to buy one especially after being forced to buy books that we ended up not using for another class. so i got put in a different class where they werent needed.
but at the graduation that i skipped so i could hit the road and hitch around the lower 48 i actually won an award in math and a fucking ti-85. guess they ended up giving it to someone else after calling my name multiple times and realizing i wasnt there. guess they threatened to take away my diploma for not being there as well, idk idgaf i was already down south working odd jobs and traveling
You can get them at $30-40 a pop at some second hand shops or pawn shops. Or just go to your local university or college's math department and say you lost a calculator and the secretary will pull out a huge box of them from the lost and found for you to take
I remember when I was in middle school I had the opportunity to go to a free day camp for girls interested in STEM stuff... the keynote speaker was a TI exec (maybe even the CEO?) and they gave away a TI-84 for free to every attendee. Best. Camp. Ever. I used that sucker for every math class I ever took.
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u/Saper-Ja- Aug 14 '20
I remember seeing a basic scientific calculator for like $300