Why Are Texas Instruments Calculators So Expensive? [LGR Tech Tales Addendum]
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- What makes TI graphing calculators cost so much? Mostly, it's because they can. But let's dive into the details in the video!
This is an addendum to LGR Tech Tales - The Calculator Wars:
• LGR Tech Tales - The P...
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So in other words, they cost so much "because they can."
That's literally it. No other reason.
Exactly!
If you consider that the price of a TI-83/-83 Plus has remained mostly unchanged since the late '90s (when I bought mine), their cost has actually _dropped_ due to inflation. A quick check at Best Buy lists the 83+ at $98.99US. Barely changed from the $89.99 for the TI-83 that was common for years.
@@jimstanley_49 but if also consider that the cost of manufacturing the technology inside said devices has dropped 100 fold in those years, then you realize they are even more of a rip off now than they were back then.
And let's not forget they were already horribly overpriced back then. They were likely making something in the realm of 2,000% profit from them. And it's probably like 20,000% now.
@@GeneralNickles seems like you should be more upset at the educators who perpetuate the _requirement_ for specific hardware. These people hold massive collective bargaining power, but they seem content to roll over and let their students take it up the wallet.
@@jimstanley_49 that's exactly who I'm upset with. I never said otherwise.
The education system that more or less requires these specific calculators are exactly why they are so expensive, and exactly why Texas instruments can get away with making them so expensive.
And that's also why they basically haven't changed in 30 years as well. There's plenty of innovation that can be done, but that's never going to happen with the system we currently have.
You know something's wrong when your $100 "graphing" calculator takes 5+ seconds to graph a line.
Erik the God Eating Penguin Most are Z80
Geez, an arduino uno would be faster than that
Erik the God Eating Penguin
I like spamming a bunch of random but complicated equations and seeing how long it takes to load 😶
"an arduino uno would be faster than that"
Throw a real-time kernel in the background and then try graphing a line.
Hmmm, maybe if I pull some Snapdragon or cheap ARM clone and a gigabyte or two of DDR2 RAM, I could have a 480p calculator capable of playing back video and instantly graphing. None of that Nspire junk.
My TI84 PLUS CE takes like 10 second to graph! They start grid graphing all over whenever I press graph. Is this normal
i like how you mentioned that the cost of this calculator shuts out lower income students. very good to mention this.
C H not really. Low income families receive cash assistance. The 100 dollars investment on something that if taken care of can last over a decade and functionally get you through a PhD in the physical sciences is really nothing. There are two types of low income. The kind that can manage money and started with nothing and the kind that is terrible with money regardless of how much they get. The second group even if the calculator was free couldn't afford it.
Where in the US do you live that you get cash assistance? I was poor once and there is no cash. Getting a calculator for school was very hard -- my parent basically have to save a couple months for $100.
@@StealthNinja4577 Some poor people don't want assistance. Some people live in gentrified areas of the country that were cheaper to live in, and became more expensive to live in overnight because rich white people decide to set up a kraft brewery in the local crack house. Also not everyone can afford a calculater in high-school, never the less a PHD.
Have you ever known want?
@@mannotwiththeplan now days you can find those calculators at garage sales and thrift stores
I'm so confused. To me, a calculator is a calculator, regardless of whether it's £1 or £100.
AMD, don't let this happen with the CPU and GPU market. lol
hey
nope, amd's problem is everything exept the pricing structure. intel is more efficent (at least was better for laptops bc of less heat and better battery life), is better at more demanding tasks ("gaming", cad, movie rendering) and has more big third-party service provider (m$, dell, lenovo,hp).
for everything else (so small companies and "the average users") amd is better suited.
intel did advertising very well at the time amd had the lead :/
+silverbackflyer no Idea of what? Now I must know!
umm, the ryzen will hit you so hard :))
Denis Sandu umm, what if it doesn't :))
I had to get one when I just moved to the States and didn't have any money. It was expensive. And then all I ended up using it for is playing games between classes.
@@ghost-jesus
I'm guessing that since you figured that out, you had no problem passing tests anyway.
ghost jesus when cheating requires a lot more creativity, problem solving capabilities and raw brain power than actual tests.
@@nykal1510 I have a suspicion that the program was probably written by /g/
I fondly but vaguely remember a text based GTA type game.
I just bought a TI-84 plus silver for $1.50 new in a garage sale
Nice score
They do turn up at thrift stores, too. Maybe you'll have to pay $5 for it there.
William Thurmer
A good way to make money is buying Ti calculators off of eBay from people who have absolutely no idea how much they’re worth and selling them way higher.
Got my TI-83 Plus silver for $0.75 at a yard sale, kept it for school, but I also resell stuff like that too.
I’ve bought a black TI-83 for £0.50p from a charity shop.
the best part was coding a cheat sheet into an "program" and well, so much for not cheating.
I find it funny they overlook this, you can use those to cheat quite a lot.
(not to mention, load games, which is a distraction)
well it's not supposed to make games. Programs are supposed to make custom calculations (interactive) like I made quite a few for surface area and volume of shapes just entering a bunch of values and the answer is spit up nice :) I know you can make WAY better stuff i just don't use my calc much
My point isn't that they were designed to do it, or are supposed to, my point is they're capable of doing it at all.
and that sounds neat!
There's a video here of a raytracer, check that out!
As I recall, pecking the characters in actually made me memorize the formulas just by doing that.
Our teachers are a little smarter, they make us clear the memory before tests. Just a little though, since they only clear the RAM, not the flash memory, so you can still "Archive" all of your stuff so it doesn't get cleared.
It's crazy how different the spheres of influence are for calculators across the pond. In Europe its all Casio calculators from what I can see, but in my secondary school you'd see the ocassional Sharp calc, even the calc I used was a 10 year old Canon. Now, for the UK A-Level at least, there is a certain calculator (Casio fx-991EX) that we almost need for the exams - Casio calcs are even referenced multiple times in the official couse textbooks, for stuff like graphing polar coordinates and inverting 3x3 matrices. At least the differnece is that my calculator new cost me £22 ($28.79). Charging $100 for a calculator would seem unimaginable over here, considering that's the cost of a week's household shop.
This is the kind of information I never asked for, yet I'm very glad I'm informed. Thanks, LGR!
You are welcome!
"It was time for TI to take action!"
Don't you mean
"Take Initiative?"
What?
David T take initiative “TI”
Ah, I see what you did there.
*puts sunglasses on*
Not funny
An idea.
1.Buy calculators and raspberry pi in bulk.
2. Replace mainboard with raspberry with custom software installed.
3. Sell to desperate college/university students.
4. Profit.
Functions: emulated calculator that looks the same as the original unit, Internet connection, cheat sheets.
+BobvanKay just look at images of the raspberry pi, it is too thick to fit inside calculator casing ;)
+raafmaat Not the Pi Zero.
+BobvanKay Too slow to boot. Bad battery life. Expensive. (screen+keyboard+raspi+battery+other stuff needed) Also it would never be okay for tests since you can cheat so easy. (tbh you can run linux on Ti nspire)
+BobvanKay The Arduino (the upper level models at least) would be at least as powerful as the Z80 in the TI-8x series and would be a better choice than raspberry pi
2chws Too old. Why use 8 bit when you could use ARM? Like the nspire models use.
I bought this damn thing twice, kept it for two weeks each time and returned it back to Walmart after my Calculus class no longer required it)))))) i beat the system!!!!!!
What I got from this is just a great guide in how to establish a monopoly.
you make the most uninteresting things, interesting.
Glad you think so :)
i thought you meant he made the most uninteresting videos and then i realized he made uninteresting objects into interesting videos
This is an interesting sentence !
I always wondered this. Literally everyone one of us in the UK use like $10 Casio calculators with the same functionality and when my US friend showed her texas instruments one to us the difference was negligible outside of some bespoke rarely used functions.
I always assumed they cost so much because it takes a lot of resources to teach math to the little gnomes that do the calculations in the device.
At least they last. I bought my TI-83+ at a Garage Sale in 2001 for $10. It still works to this day.
Very interesting, I often wondered how TI became so dominant especially when compared to the superior HP calculators that utilized RPN notation. RPN took some time to get use to but once you got the hang of it switching back to an algebraic calculator was and is very difficult. I love HP and RPN so much that I have HP 48GX app for my iPhone.
How about programming?
VitalNutrients - What about programming? All the HP scientific calculators are fully programmable, you can even program arcade games like Galaga, breakout, tetris etc on them.
HP calculators have been programmable since 1979 (HP-41C). HP RPN calculators are popular in professional communities from scientific and engineering to statistics and finance (and outside the US). The latest RPN is the HP-50G. I got an original HP-48GX on ebay and use the DROID48 app on my phone almost daily, app is identical to the HP-48GX. RPN is my favorite, intuitive and fast.
My more than 15-years-old TI-89 is still working and looking good. I used to program it in C with TIGCC. And I also played games like Super Mario and Galaga on it with very high frame rates. These are great devices, I am glad LGR reviewed them.
Interesting. Very different over here in the UK. We were recommended a Casio FX series calculator when I started secondary school, I got the FX-83 and my brother (a year older) got the FX-82 as the predecessor model. I guess over here Ti were nowhere near as powerful commercially.
I still have my FX-83 nearly 17 years later...
+Duncan Taylor FX-Anything Master Race.
+Duncan Taylor are those calculators decently priced or kinda expensive?
Yeah, here in Spain it sort of happens similarly to in the US but with Casio instead of TI. (not to that extreme though) In fact, I have never seen a TI calculator yet! XD (99% Casios, with very rarely an HP thrown in).
Still, Casio graphing calculators are rather expensive too, but not as much as TI's. I reciently bought an FX-9700GII or so and it was around 70 euros, not 100!
+Duncan Taylor Yea I remember at my school most people used some variant of the fx7000. And I've still got my school fx7400g 18 years later!
+Duncan Taylor I still have my fx-82 from over 20 years ago still works just fine.
the programming community was built right into the TI website, which was awesome. Great modding community.
Other companies have stayed alive marketing to other countries i think. I havent heard of TI calculators over here, most of the graphing calculators i have ever seen have been HP
Derpin Bird where i live there are quite many ti calculators, we also use one of the newer models in school
TI doesn't rely on calculators for the majority of their income, being only 3% of their sales. Chances are good that you have used some devices or driven some cars that have their chips in them though.
Most makers don't, im just saying over here in aus its nothing but HP
Derpin Bird I live in QLD, we used TI in the mid 2000s over here. Some Casios, I don't remember any HPs though.
Im a bit younger so i only used graphs 05 onward, ive only seen hps but i haven't done super high math. Maybe its level or curriculum but ive never seen a ti
Government control of education has handed TI a near complete monopoly on the market. The calculator costs a couple dollars to manufacture using stunningly archaic hardware, yet they continue to hold their position solely because of the education system.
You're partly correct, but it's an overly simple answer. I looked into this when I was forced to buy two TI calculators for my algebra course.
First, why was I forced to buy two? Because TI is the only electronics manufacturer I have ever purchased a product from whose model numbering system goes backward from all others: the TI-85 is *less* capable and an *older* model than the TI-84. I didn't know this, bought a TI-85 because I thought it was the newer model, and got burned for not being an informed consumer. Go figure.
I digress. The TI calculator line intentionally lacks some features that make it preferable to educators: they have no wireless capability (no sharing of answers during exams), they have no removable memory card (no saving of programs for during tests if the teacher goes around the room resetting them all), and by default lack specific mathematics capabilities that force students to actually learn how to write, use, and solve equations. Also, many of the functions are "standard" to the entire TI line, making them convenient for teachers in the classroom.
But the biggest market advantage TI has by far is their educator support structure and their general marketing streategy. Their calculators are *extremely* well-documented and their marketing to the educational market, *and more specifically to the exam writers*, has been immensely successful. If you couple that with the way they have marketed their products to textbook writers- and more specifically, textbook publishers in the state of Texas, where the major educational textbook publishers are all located (yeah, the Texas Board of Education really does actually control what most US students read in school textbooks because Texas is where our textbooks get published)- what you end up with is a comparably obsolete product constructed using obsolescent technology that doesn't even have a backlight being sold for the tenth power of what it actually should cost at retail.
It *sucks*, but it really isn't all the fault of the government. And you're absolutely correct that it's a monopoly, but try arguing that antitrust laws and anti-monopoly regulations should be enforced for *anything* these days.
if it was wireless then no school would allow it and second of all u can archive some of the files so wen teachers delete shit u can still have it when u move it to ram
... oh, and heads up, the intel 8087 isn't a better 8086, it's an accessory for it. Why wouldn't you check what the differences between products are? It's not like they name them after years...
+Kyle Nally
The larger factor is indeed just sly marketing, but I see more people with non-TIs in tutoring all the time. I think it would be naive to say TI didn't grease some palms in public school programs. You are allowed a _TI_ in the AP exams and certain standardized tests run by or funded by the government.
TIs are durable though. Mine is from 2006 and works just as well as it did before. I have no incentive to buy a Casio or competitor because my TI-83 still works, does everything I really want it to, and if I want to do something more intricate I have Wolfram Alpha and R.
The only thing that would get me to buy another calculator would be if it came with a stylus and instead of typing things in, I wrote it out on something about as big as a tablet and it recognized the normal math symbols. Tablets kind of already have that though, so it's a bit of a moot point.
Logan S. Nothing to do with the educational system, has to do with the kickbacks the people running it are getting.
We were encouraged (forced?) to buy Casio ones at my school in Australia the early 2000s but they were still expensive. I've had mine since 2002 and it still runs today with all the games on it. I look at games I programmed myself and have no idea how I did it, the knowledge has faded completely over 18 years haha. The worst part was when the teacher wanted to transfer you a new program for graphing - through the link cable of course - and you had to delete a game to make room for it :(
Always had HP ones, RPN FTW.
Learning the fucking keystrokes are much harder than actually learning the equations
The only 2 calculators that you showed pictures of are the only graphing calculators I own! A TI-83 Plus and a TI-89 Titanium! What a coinkydink.
Thanks TI. I used the TI-82 in school and all I learned to do was memorize button sequences to get the right answer.
I dont see the point of having a super high end 200$ graphing calculator (ti of course) when a 35 $ casio can do all that you need.
the only real reason is to use as a emulator
I did discover a need for a TI recently. I got screwed over on a final exam for a third-year Electrical Engineering course because a question required you to compute a number with a complex exponent, which only TI graphers can do. To be fair though, one could possibly write a Casio BASIC program to do the job.
+themaritimeman TI, HP and Casio scientific calcs can do this function.
+Gerson Silva What Casio models do you know can do it? I have an FX-300MS, an FX-991MS, an FX-6300G, and a CFX-9850G, and none of them can do it. Even a simple one like 5^(2+3i) returns a math error.
Umm… its not even 200- get your facts right
Interesting. Here in the UK even when I was doing my mechanical engineering degree you weren't allowed to have a programmable calculator in exams. In fact we all got given a CASIO FX-85 GT Plus scientific calculator which retailed at like £7 or thereabouts back then (about 10 years ago). And that wasn't even because it was mandated by the university; it was literally the maths lecturer who convinced the Engineering Department to buy them because he was sick of having to go around the class of over 100 students trying to help them figure out how their calculators worked lol.
After I had finished using it, my TI-83 was grabbed by our dog and buried under a bush in our yard. I found it sticking out of the dirt presumably months later, and it still worked! My sister later used it when she went to college.
I prefer a hardware calculator if I need to do homework lol. It's just better than a touch screen in my opinion.
It's easier making calculations with a calculator than using a computer, I find.
I use MatLab personally. Less writing, less rework when you find a mistake and you can save scripts to help with later work.
I use MatLab personally. Less writing, less rework when you find a mistake and you can save scripts to help with later work.
You put your comment twice.
You put your comment twice.
Honestly, this question ranks right on up there with Why are college text books so damn expensive? It's because they know you have to have it.
Luis Mendez Yeah. I just rented mine through Amazon so I payed 25 bucks instead of 250
Because you chose to attend college in a country where text books aren't included in your tuition fees?
@@gwishart LOL, so to save money on text books, move to another country? (smfh)
nearly never used my ti 89 in university.
Not allowed in exams, and for all other applikations i use wolfram alpha
Because it's a TI-89, they're banned on most exams. Get a TI-84s are more generally approved on exams.
I used a TI-86. Discontinued in 2004. By the time I was in college in 2011, no one had ever heard of that calculator and only the TI 89 was banned by name. The TI 86 had 95% of the functionality of an TI 89, including what is above and beyond what the more common TI-83 and TI-84 could do.
I'm a rebel. I used hp in college.
TheG-Man HP rules -even if they stopped doing the best :( -
Sav
Heck, I still have an HP41CX app on my phone.
@@RolandWartenberg you've been in school since the early 80's? wewlad it might be time to give up.
The HP 15 c Still the best for the mechanical designer. Most of the solid works folks still can not dimension a drawing because the software manual does not teach fits and clearances.
That's the other thing. Once upon a time, calculator were awesome tools to calculate, because there was no better tools available. Nowadays, the calculators are crippled to be used in schools, so the students cannot cheat with it (or so the school and education boards are led to believe). Which makes the calculators scammed into schools and students pretty crappy calculating tools. What's worse, from my professional perspective as a physicist who sometimes had to teach math, current calculators are WORSE tools to teach math than proper calculating tools like the HP 15 C (despite the fact that they can display math symbols instead of just numbers.)
@@elgarak How about the HP Prime?
Highly informative. Thank you.
You are most welcome.
3:46 This looks very ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ
It reminds me of the cover arts of the V a p o r - w a v e music which was popular in 2016.
They're fantastic tools to learn programming & computer architecture. My first was a TI85 then about a year or so later a TI86 then I snagged up the TI89 within a few weeks of it's availability I believe in late 1998. I remember hoping TI would release a color version equipped with the same type of transflective TFT display found in the then new Game Boy Color & either an eZ80 or enhanced variant of the MC68000, I was acquainted to an engineer who worked on one of the teams who developed TI's line of Graphing Calculators, I got to play with such hardware in development I was hoping would come to market but the single unit cost of a color display at the time was outside TI's desired price range especially if they used the preferred, much lower power consuming, transflective TFT's manufactured by Sharp.
When i was in school only the richest kids had TI calculators. These things did cost the equivalent of 2 to 400€.. nobody could afford them and we all knew that in high school, these things were just overkill. So, 99% of us had Casios.
Still, they were utterly useless in maths, but were a good introduction into programming, as we kept sharing magazines with games in Basic for Casio ^^
I couldn't afford one until college, when the Pell Grant gifted me better learnin' tools.
These were definitely elite gear in high school, and they were a back door to gaming in Math class, for those who owned their own and bothered to look up the necessary code.
Interesting, Here in Norway my high-school math teacher told us the get Casio and avoid TI like the plague.
In Europe schools went exactly the other way around, here it's all about Casio. I had a TI calculator back in the day, and then had to buy another one, because only Casio machines were allowed. The school programs through which you could buy calculators also only sold Casio ones.
When I was in school 2005-2011 in the UK, the graphing calculator of choice was the Sharp EL-9900, with non advance mathematics using a Casio Fx82. Much cheaper!
Short answer: *It's a monopoly*
I had a Ti 30 when I was 6, other kids at school were looking at me like an alien when I pulled it out of the little... woody woodpecker pouch my momma crafted for it.
The teacher loved it to the point he nicknamed it the "woody calc".
I had a finance class in college that required us to buy Texas Instrument calculators for assignments. I asked if I could buy a more capable HP Prime calculator instead. The teacher told me I couldn't due to the instructions all using a specific Texas Instruments calculator.
This kind of thing is what kills off competition and why I decided to buy the HP anyway. Still have it to this day. Use if occasionally for programming now.
Fun fact: I never had a Texas calculator. I only had Sharp. I'm Canadian.
This video unfairly does not discuss the merits of the TI graphing calculators during the 90's. As a physics student, I became very interested in scientific and, particularly, graphing calculators during the 80's and 90's. I owned nearly all of the graphing calculators that came out during that time including the HP 28S, and 48S, the Casio fx-7000G, the TI-81, and TI-85. While in graduate school at Ole Miss around 1992, it was obvious by then that TI graphing calculators were easily the best available, offering the most logical and intuitive interfaces, speed, and functionality, along with very good documentation and excellent support, particularly for education.
As an aside, the TI-85 was my favorite graphing calculator at that time, so I decided to write Texas Instruments a letter expressing that, as well as listing detailed suggestions for their next graphing calculator. Among those suggestions were to upgrade the processor from the Z80 to the Motorola 68000, which offered 32-bit flat memory space and much higher performance giving it the capacity to run more sophisticated software with WYSIWYG capabilities like Mathcad -- and I pointed out the existence of Derive, with similar capabilities in a very small memory footprint -- and offer expansive symbolic math support for calculus and algebra. I also suggested implementing a QWERTY keyboard, a d-pad, a larger, higher resolution display, pull down menus, 3d graphing, and more. I went into a lot of detail. I didn't expect a response from TI, but a few weeks later I got a letter from them enthusiastically thanking me for my suggestions and that my input will be taken seriously for upcoming calculator designs. Imagine my surprise when the groundbreaking TI-92 was released a few years later, incorporating ALL of my suggestions.
While it is overpriced, I love my Ti-84 it's so easy to use.
I've still got a Ti-81 :) and a Casio fx-7600G
My dad had them when He went to college back in the 80's and they're still alive, I take the Casio one everyday with me to Uni!
So yeah, expensive but everlasting.
If I cannot build a level for Unreal Tournament with it, what good is it
I must add that calculator with physical buttons dedicated to calculating is way more ergonomic to use than touchscreen and app. And it can play Doom too!
yes it is but there is no reason a z80 with 24k or so of ram should cost that much. like cmon
@@SimonBauer7 I agree. The profit for manufacturer is obscene. Even if the chassis, finish and quality control is best possible (spoiler - it is not) the price is very high.
Yes the calculators are expensive, but by gosh they are reliable. I have had my calculator since freshman year in high school, I'm a senior in college.
This was more of a company man, style video the bigger than you know and explanation of the monopoly, really good.
Back in school we had Casio FX80. The school banned more advanced machines but it was removed the next year.
i used to work for staples and we sold all kinds of these things. i dunno if you can call what we did as a scam but the highschools in the area required a ti-83 for freshman years and a ti-84 for sophomore. if sales were bad for the 83 we would simply neglect to tell people that and sell them a ti-83 knowing they would need another model next year
Back when I attended an Australian high school in the early 2000s we used Casio graphing calculators. The school provided them but if I wanted to buy my own one it would cost only $30.
Hey how many times now...?
You're not even allowed to bring graphing calculators into UK maths exams.
Why can't students just buy the things secondhand? It's not as if they wear out or have any use after students have finished taking tests for which they need examination conditions forbidding smartphones.
Lots of students do! In fact, schools often provide an in-house shop for buying/selling stuff with other students.
I also have to give it to TI because I bought my Ti84 Plus C in 9th grade, and I still have it 6 years later going as strong as ever, after dropping it a million times, they're indestructable. Once you buy one, you really don't have to buy another ever. Even the Ti83+ my dad bought in 99 works just fine today. Its impressive
Schnookums The TI 84 plus Silver Edition is pretty unique in that it has more RAM (128 kB, vs only 48) that a custom OS can use.
Still, a cheaper smartphone has infinitely more punch per dollar than these pieces of junk. The TIs have only two advantages for me; they're nigh-impossible to break, and the battery lasts for years.
James Petts they were out. Even if you don't drop it, the keys will stuck by time. A lot of people have this problem with their 4 year old Calc
GoLDnTRiXX. Was denn sonst? I have had mine for 5 years, and so far it has only cosmetic damage. Keys coming up and down just as smoothly as they used to. No idea how you have to treat yours to actually break it...
The Texas Instruments calculators are (were?) also standard in Denmark. Man, they were expensive. I still have mine.
I got my Nspire CX CAS for a bit over 100 bucks some 6 years ago and I did not feel scammed. It really is a very capable device and it is obvious that any device with wireless internet connectivity is not allowed in any kind of exam scenario.
I'm just glad colleges have done away with "showing your work", "turn in scratch paper". You either know the formulas and procedures or you don't. Getting the right answer with these tools IS THE WAY!
One point overlooked when it comes to outdated, ubiquitous, expensive hardware manufactured by "natural" monopolies is a massive 2nd-hand market. Shit, some kids use calculators their parents used in school. No point in buying a new $130 TI-83/84 when a 15-year-old one for $5 at a flee market/garage sale/pawn shop is exactly the same thing.
Here in Germany the TI-82 is the only model approved for the final exams in higher education school. The price is rather high accordingly.
Brilliant move on TI's part. I wonder why Casio didnt do it first.
"Not actual monopoly" people: you are right, but it is still a *Quasi Monopoly.*
A true monopoly has government regulation as its cause, while a quasi-monopoly is precisely what this is. The calculator situation is the definition of quasi-monopoly.
Since they haven't changed much in the last 20 years a lot of the older models are crazy cheap used. Yeah they're stupid expensive new but you can get them pretty reasonable for the hardware used, especially first gen case style models like the Ti 81, 82, 85 can go for as little as $10. The second gen case style models like the Ti 83, 83 Plus, 83 Plus SE, 86, and 89 can go for as little as $25 or so. Even the third gen styles like the 89 Titanium edition, 84 Plus, 84 Plus SE, you can usually get around $40 or so. Plus you can't forget about the budget middle school oriented models that will still do most the stuff the full fat models will do. The TI-80, TI-73, 73 Explorer, and the 2004 case redesign of the 73 Explorer will still graph stuff and are very nearly as capable as the other models and even the newest ones you can usually get for $20 or under. Most calculator based assignments designed for a TI-84 can be done basically the same on a TI-82, not to mention the fact that there are free android emulators that will let you emulate an 83/84 in it's entirety.
Teachers at my district have been allowing the use of the desmos website on tests
Interesting. Most places ban devices that can connect to the internet for hopefully obvious reasons
@@The23rdGamer but we have some great (too good) blocking software
This is the most American business model ever.
I had a ti-89, it was a more powerful calculator with more memory than the ti83 plus all my math classes required but looked pretty much identical to the ti83 plus, and allowed for better resolution and grayscale graphics, and i had a version of link’s awakening and kirby that looked exactly like their gameboy counterparts, my little 16 year old brain was blown away. I loved how i was basically playing full on games in class in high school while my teachers just thought it was a calculator lol
It’s easier to cheat with my ti-84 plus ce than it is with my phone. Lol
Ashton Henley ikr. I’ve never been asked to reset my calculator going into a test and it’s really easy to save notes onto these things.
TI calculators aren't bad. Good for learning basic programming and learning algorithms.
The original gameboy is simular to the ti and it costed around $99 . And most products on any shelf in stores cost 1/3 to buy then they need to makes profit. So ti is only making like 15 bucks profit from each one sold on store shelves
The STEM community needs to put this ridiculous practice behind them. We should be using the technology available to us not trying to make a dirty buck off of 30 year old technology.
However the TI84+ i had to get for school is the only calculator i still use regularly due to its nice clicky buttons. Most cheaper calculators feel like crap while the expensive ones feel almost like a mechanical keyboard.
i used a casio FX9750GII through middle school and high school. my teacher got pissed at me but i just told them it's what i knew how to use and i couldn't afford the TI option.
Casio is much better
You wasted time relaying your opinion on UA-cam. No facts here...and "better" is a relative term seeing as how Ti snatched 93% of the market.
I remember getting a Ti-81 out of the trash in 9th grade after my teacher threw one away because it had dead rows of pixels on the screen. I used it all through high school and never bought one.
I used a Casio fx-9860 (which cost close to $300 in Australia, so I don't know why you guys are complaining that $100 is too much!)
It was awesome, there was a program you could load that would literally overclock the processor by 2 times. It would literally draw the graph twice as quick!
I learned a lot of programming on the TI-83. I already knew basic from my old Dos PC and later I would learn c++. But in between, I used to program in games and other apps on the TI-83. I spent a lot of time as a teenager figuring it out.
I am in Australia and we are stuck with Ti calculators.... And they are ridiculously expensive.
The university I go to doesn’t allow calculators of any kind in math classes, and graphing calculators are all but banned except for in financial classes. Even in classes like Calculus, Linear Algebra, and others.
They got Canada as well. I know a grand total of 1 person with a casio in high school. In mid 90s
Lol I got a Casio FX-9750GII. It was half the price of the TI-83 at just $48, faster, and had all the functions I needed for my pre-calculus class. Essentially, I would smoke my classmates because of the integrated functions, and so I would have to wait those extra few seconds while everyone else had to type out their equations. I got a lot of flak for “just sitting there” from my teacher. Even after I would show her my screen and proved I had indeed done the “work”, I would get the evil eye.
Good times. Now I sold my Casio for $25 to my brother who’s using for some Calc 2 class.
At my school we have this thing called the TMC where students can check out calculators and text books so that the lower income students still have the means to aquire a TI calculator
You will rip my Casio from my cold, dead, hands. I find the UI on those so much easier to deal with.
At this point, I am enrolled in college. I bought a Casio 9750gii for $45 not really knowing what to expect. Now I have it's software upgraded to a 9860gii and I cannot be any happier with it. I'm so glad I didn't get the overpriced TI.
My college semester just started and I had to go to 3 different stores to find 1 Ti-84 because every student that didn’t have one had to buy one.
@5:33 you're wrong. The SAT/AP allow pretty much every calculator under the sun, including Casio/HP ones.
Also, Ti only dominates the American Market. It is almost non-existent in Asian and European markets?
I really wish TI would expand the BASIC language on the calculators. Granted these aren't meant to be programming machines, it would be nice if it was easier to make graphical interfaces with the version of TI BASIC. Plus it would be nice if you could directly print text to various coordinates on the screen (such as using a LOCATE command found various flavors of Basic for regular computers, where you could give screen coordinates (usually row and column numbers) and print text or a character at that location. That or make it easier for people to write and upload assembly programs to the TI 83/84 series calculators. That's my only gripe about the TI BASIC system and the calculators, and yeah I know they were intended to just write short programs consisting of formulas for quick or complex calculations but it would have been nice if they would have expanded the language and given people more options for doing different things, like interacting with the USB port for example. The other thing is that since the TI BASIC and the calculator firmware hasn't changed much, half of the programs and apps that TI has (such as NoteFolio for the TI calculators and its companion app for the computer so you can transfer notes) doesn't even work with some of the latest operating systems.
Oh man I got into Bubble Bobble on my graphing calculator then a whole operating system of games.
I remembered buying a Ti-84 calculator during high school.
Ti-89 for life. College was so easy. Still had to show my work, but at least I knew I was right.
my classes always seemed to prefer the Cassio brand and I was only one of three in one of my classes with a TI graphing calculator but I was always able to finish my graphs much faster and efficiently than the Cassio users. I liked that mine seemed to like fractions a lot better
My school has full colour TI nspire for our school and they’re 200 dollars a pop and are essentially microcomputers
Is the TI thing a "thing" outside of the States? I finished school in the UK back in the late 90s, and almost everyone was using Casio devices back then.
I remember that my high school had a list of features required for a programmable graphing calculator, and had the option to buy or loan one from the school (which if memory serves, was a colour-screen Casio device), but things may have changed later on I guess.
See also the education history of the Apple II!
Bought Ti-83 Plus in 2002.. it was quite expensive calculator and needs 4xAAA, strange keyboard layout... used it through my university studies and it still works, but it is overhyped a lot and could have easily be 1/3 the price and using some better power source like competitors.
I used both TI 84-Plus and Casio equivalent models. Must say that Casio is way more intuitive to use with simpler interface. TI is like working with Linux while Casio is more like Windows... But then my school only teach and allow usage of TI...