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Comment by Mononokay | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually pretty enthusiastic about this; Templeton resided over the golden era of TI, and now he's back in the role of CEO.

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Interesting that they don't intend his tenure to be temporary.

He wasn't CEO for all of 47 days. Some would call that a long vacation.

Presumably the board hopes he identifies/designates the successor to pursue a new golden age for TI.

Can we at least acknowledge that charging $150 for a calculator is no longer in line with "golden age" and more with "because we can"? In terms of their chips, TI is fantastic. But the part of them that every kid and student sees can do with a fixin' uppin'

You can get equivalent and superior calculating software for free. What do you want TI to fix up?

The $150 you pay for a College Board certified calculator goes entirely towards the ability to use it on a College Board test without being considered a cheater.

If you want to lower that cost, there's always the self-service approach -- produce $50 Android phones with calculator software preinstalled and the phone and wifi connectivity ripped out. Then get the College Board to certify your calculator. You can have TI's market share, if you can get the certification.

Sounds like NumWorks [0]

[0] https://www.numworks.com/

Except NumWorks is $100.

Are Casio not an option? They're not cheap, but they're cheaper.

Their Education division is low single digit percentage points of TI's business. While it almost certainly has huge margins it's up in the air as to whether it's more bullet point on a slide internally.

The dream of a durable, programmable graphing calculator with a high-resolution AMOLED display with solid graphics processing, touch screen as pointing device, and hard QWERTY keyboard with no other major frills (no network interfaces, no android, no app stores or apps, thus facillitating a subversive, loyal ROM underground scene), for less than $50 USD may yet come true.

It wouldn’t be RPN so it might as well not exist.

As long as it runs on a Z80 I’m on board.

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