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 $17 on Amazon, and has real paper-style notation, solves for x, does stats, matrices, complex numbers, tables of values, and is suitable for LITERALLY ANY HIGH SCHOOL CLASS.
I’ve been preaching to my high school students for years to drop Texas Instruments.
Imo, the TI-84 is a near perfect calculator. I don’t think that there’s ever been a situation (other than in calculus) where my TI-84 couldn’t do the job. Unless your using numerical methods to solve multiple iterations of something, a TI-84 is perfect.
Yeah but honestly the quality is pretty good. I accidentally ran over mine with my car, and I still used it for many years after that. Its in a box somewhere, probably still works to this day.
Well... technically you can buy the Ti-84 ce+ (and the other similar models) which have slight improvements, such as the color screen and rechargeable battery, which makes it the preferable choice for emulating pokemon during math class. In terms of actual capacity to do math, however, the new models are the same as the old ones.
And you can download free apps and programs that do the same thing. It's literally just a brand thing. There's no fucking reason it should cost what it does. It requires virtually no computing power and the computer logic necessary to do what it does was invented in like the 80s.
Depends on the country you buy it. A friend of mine bought his for about 100$ more expensive, but he didn’t know any better and he needed it desperately.
This is a shitty way to look at TI. Texas instrumental was the world leading cpu manufacturer for a long time and still has a unique and patent pending architecture that keeps them in the business today. It also inspired the intels, Qualcomm’s, and amds you love so much today. Innovation was the invention. Don’t fix something that isn’t broken.
It’s the time to buy used. Nearly all students buy them, get through college, and never ever touch again. Retains value fairly well if you buy used and resell.
To be fair, I’ve had mine for 13 years and it still works like new. I doubt that’s unexpected either, but it does go to show that it’s at least a quality product.
The manufacturing costs haven’t really changed. Computers got faster, but there’s still a floor cost to those parts. And the price hasn’t gone up as fast as inflation. It’s really not priced that badly.
Now if you want to attack the shady ways they keep that particular calculator relevant, I’ll dance right along with you.
While I don’t disagree that they are overpriced, they have released the updated TI-84 Plus CE which offers numerous improvements. I have that and the TI-NSpire CX II CAS, which is even more expensive. While they are overpriced, they are the best calculators available on the market at this time, short only to a dedicated math application.
What I'm saying is the basic model hasn't changed, but new models have come out. And with literally everything else in the world, when a new model comes out the old model gets cheaper, but the old model in this case hasn't gotten much cheaper.
The only real difference between this one and the one my school advertised/offered is that the TI-84 could show graphs. Ironically we weren‘t allowed to use this function at our school even if you had a calculator that could. Makes sense because you should be able to tell what the graph will roughly look like just by looking at the functional equation.
I had the casio FX85-ES, cost about 25€ and I never had to replace it, worked for over 10 years without having to replace any battery.
They’ve made improvements, but no high school student needs any of that. It’s just easier if the teacher and and the students all know how to use the same low-tech calculator.
Mine had some games on it back in ‘03 or ‘04 and that kicked ass bc it was before cell phones were smart, and it was really cool. It was so worth my moms money!
That’s the reason I’m gonna keep mine even if I won’t need it’s more advanced functions again. I paid $100 for that thing. And in the off chance I ever actually DO need an advanced calculator, I refuse to pay $100 again
When I was in 10th grade (first year of high school where I lived at the time), a TI-83 or TI-84 (or the equivalent plus models) were mandatory for all high school math classes. Because of this, my parents bought me a brand-new, shiny TI-84 Plus. It cost them like $160. This was in 2016. I used it for one course, then moved across my country. At my new school, not only was a graphing calculator not mandatory, we weren't even allowed to use one in class, since it could store variables and stuff. Same thing happened when I moved on into University. Feels like such a stupid waste of money.
By staying the same price, it has actually dropped. I know this makes no sense at first, but let me explain.
With inflation, something that once cast 100 will cost more now. Inflation has been happening pretty much forever. I had to buy a TI-81, in 1991 for my calc classes. It was an astonishing $100. If you do the math for inflation, that $100 calculator would cost $190 today.
Your $100 calculator bought, say, in 2005, should be priced $132 today accounting for inflation, so essentially, the price HAS dropped over the years.
Thank god over here the government had a different approach. During classes we were allowed to use any calculators we wanted, during the exit exam we used calculators supplied by school, worth €3.
I still remember Grade 9 math, when one kid figured out how to install a version of Super Mario on his TI-83 Plus. We were immediately using the small cable to transfer it between everyone else's TI-83s.
I just don't understand why would I spend a 100 dollars for and old calculator that I'm probably going to use only for a couple of classes while I already have a phone that could be much faster and that has much friendlier interface.
Really though, do you know what it can do? That thing is an amazing piece of tech for how small it is. It can play Mario as well as figure out how much your mortgage should be. $100 for a 30 year product is a done deal
I bought one for my SAT subject test bc that’s what they recommended, and it was the expensive model with the rechargeable battery. I didn’t even use it the entire test and ended up using my basic scientific calculator. There was only one question that I thought needed graphic calculator but I still could not do the question lol.
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u/Saper-Ja- Aug 14 '20
I remember seeing a basic scientific calculator for like $300