For many of us in United States, the TI-83 Plus is the quintessential (pre-college) calculator. It was required for many classes (e.g. AP Calculus) and the $100+ price tag 10+ years ago did not do wonders for the wallet. Still, the multi-line interface, matrix operation capabilities and games such as
made it a versatile instrument pre-iphone.Yet, as an electronic system in a highly competitive field, why is the same TI-83 Plus still almost as pricey as a decade ago?? Keep in mind that with the same money, one can buy a 4th gen ipod touch with a Color screen, gigabytes of ram and streaming video+wifi and that the same smartphones a year from now are probably worth far less (try selling the older motorola razr's now). This extends beyond phones to vcrs (remember those?), stereos etc.
John Herrman from Buzzfeed gives us a reasonable explanation - captive customers:
This is a list of CollegeBoard-approved calculators for the AP exams (college-level high school courses) which includes the TI-83 Plus. The TI-83 Plus has remained on this list for at least a decade, requiring each new batch of customers/students to either buy from the year above (which may or may not happen depending on the older students' needs) or buy a new set of the same product.
This is only the beginning, however - teachers get used to these approved calculators (specifically) TI-83 Plus and learn to teach with them. Study guides, manuals etc. for calculus come directly with TI-83 Plus-specific instructions, further strengthening the stickiness of the the product. Given that the underlying topics (high-school/early college mathematics) do not change much, the product does not need to improve much.
As a result, for these certain products (especially the TI-83 Plus) there is an institutionally-mandated and sticky demand for these.
Unfortunately, it is harder to translate this into an investment because calculators as a whole is only 3% of revenues for the producer (page 6), Texas Instruments (TXN). Calculators revenues are lumped into an "other" segment that includes other products - but it is interesting to note that this other segment has the highest operating margin (page 36) of the company:
(icon source: http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~jam5093/introduction.html)
Interesting article. My brother graduated from high school in 1998 and was using the TI-82. I graduated in 2003 and was using the TI-83 in high school. It's more or less un-changed in a decade.
Might make for a valuable, hi margin smartphone app for Texas Instruments. Sell the app for $50 and present a graphing calculator with supreme graphics compared to the garbage that is the TI-83 graphics.
A thing we need to get back to is reverse polish notation (RPN) calculators. Did my investment banking training for my first job out of college with an RPN Texas Instruments calculator and it blew me away. So much more intuitive. Made it very difficult to use a graphing calculator.
EDIT: using an HP 12c financial calculator.
Related http://xkcd.com/768/
I do miss my shitty TI 83 calc. I remember playing all sorts of games on it back in the day. Everyone had one and used it like a Game Boy. But because it was a math tool we could BS the teachers that we using it for educational purposes.
Pretty sure there is an app of some sort for it
I've had the same TI-84+ since 2004. I still occasionally play BlockDude, though I can't beat the last level and refuse to cheat.
The App isn't as useful as you think. Considering you cant use a cell phone on the SAT or other test its not very useful.
That's true. There's a big home school movement going on now and it would probably be a nice tool for them.
Anyone know why this calculator used in AP Calculus? Granted I never took the course in high school, but I could never figure out why you would need a calculator to do single variable calculus
I like my BA2, but RPN has always appealed to me. What a dilemma.
I liked my BA2 until I used HP RPN. After you get used to it it's the greatest thing ever.
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