Ask HN: Strange: Why haven't TI graphing calculators dropped in price? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Strange: Why haven't TI graphing calculators dropped in price?

16 pointsgaggle22 comments

According to Moore's law, graphing calculators should be super cheap right now, but TI sells standard graphing calculators for about $140 still. What's the deal?

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The deal is that they are pretty much required and if you have a captive market then you can make your price whatever the poor folks will be able to pay for it.

Or would you like your child to be behind the rest of the class?

This sort of thing will happen whenever a piece of gear becomes 'mandated'.

This is why simple GNU/Linux based computers with open-source software should become the mandatory platform for schools.

There's no reason that TI graphing calculators should be mandatory in this day and age

Well, part of the reason why TI hardware is required and not just graphing software is that students often need something they can take home with them.

Laptops running GNU/Linux, despite having no software costs, will still be significantly more expensive than even $140 calculators.

What is needed is an open source, cheap hardware calculator, and as far as I know, nobody has anything like that on the market.

One of the reasons TI calculators are so popular in schools is because TI works a lot with textbook producers. I worked for a company developing math books for a large publisher and we had a lot of contact with TI. they gave us tons of calculators, gave us pre-releases of new calculators and various other accessories. Thus we wrote our textbook targeting the TI calculators. This is why many textbooks come with TI specific instructions and come with software that only works with TI calculators.

This is probably the reason that many schools mandate these calculators, they're written into the curriculum by default. so it only natural to require them.

The cost of making them is surely getting lower, in accordance with Moore's Law.

I would assume the price remains the same because they have little competition (almost a pseudo monopoly - it seems like they're the only one because their brand is so powerful) and a lot of demand.

I would think that if someone manufactured a similar product which costs $15, the TI brand name wouldn't compensate for the price difference.

Perhaps it's a complex product and teachers won't switch products because they've invested so much into learning how to use the TI? And teachers decide what calculators are required for a given class? Maybe a competitor would have to get to the teachers first and convince them to use a cheaper alternative.

Another possibility: perhaps TI has some vital patents?

I know many of my classes required that I own and use a TI throughout high school. Other types of calculators where not allowed.

It might be worth paying some extra for TI because the UI is consistent with what your peers, textbooks and teacher uses.

When I was in school, many classes were standardized on particular models such as the TI-83 and TI-85. On the first day of class, my teachers would always say "I teach using this model and if you don't have it, you are on your own". I didn't want to be on my own so I bought the recommended model.

In business, you can price based on "cost plus a markup" or you can price based on what the market will bear. In the case of TI, they price based on what the market will bear.

i remember thinking the same thing when i saw this:

http://xkcd.com/768/

maybe they cost so much now because there's only one engineer left who remembers how to make displays that crappy

Just an ineresting tidbit, wolfram|alpha originally tried to sell their iPhone app for $50 dollars with the rational that they offered a product that in many ways exceded the capibilities of a graphing calculator. Nobody bought it, because it was overpriced for an iPhone app. I know that I feel just as familiar using wolfram as I do using a TI.

Also, a large segment of the market for TI calculators is composed of high school students who wouldn't be able to use an iPhone app on a test (teachers often ban phones from tests since they could be used to get answers from a friend).

I have my chartered finanial analyst (CFA) designation and the ti-ba II+ is the only calculator allowed for the 3 years of exams required to get the designation. It is a very simple device and this lock-in is the only way I would have paid $65 for each of the three I own.

There's no reason that you couldn't make a simple open-source web-app calculator that performs all the functions of that calculator.

The TI-BAII+ is primitive in comparison to what is possible to program and create a web-gui.

Heck they have even made their own iPhone/iPad version:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/ba-ii-plus-tm-financial-calculat...

Really? I thought the HP-12C was still the gold standard in finance.

It is, and the HP-12C is allowed for the CFA exams.

That said, it's a very short list of what calculators are allowed.

A brand new TI (or HP) calculator might have a 150 MHz processor and 20 MB of user-accessible storage space, which is quite a bit better than the 6 MHz / 28 KB from my 18 year old TI-85. By Moore's law, we'd expect 9 doublings in that time period, which is almost exactly what we get in terms of storage. It's harder to judge the jump in CPU capabilities (not everything can be measured by clock speed), but we're no more than a couple of doublings away from what Moore's law would predict.

Graphing calculators are probably also overpriced, but that's not a matter of Moore's law, it's a matter of market inefficiencies and lockin.

HP calculators defy Moore's law far more dramatically, after nearly 30 years the price has dropped slightly more than 50%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-10C_series#HP-12C

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/215348-215348-...

When I was in high school, a TI-83 was required. Not just a graphing calculator, but specifically a TI-83 graphing calculator.

I'm guessing a lot of students are in the same position where the exact tool is specified which means there isn't much room for competing graphing calculators. No competition means no incentive to reduce pricing.

The major components of the calculator are the screen, buttons, and batteries -- I think those cost more then the silicon chips inside -- and those prices have not dropped as fast.

Nonetheless, they are overpriced.

Why is a (graphing) calculator necessary to learn calculus?

It's not. In my calculus classes we weren't even allowed to use graphing calculators.

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