The latter has, among other things, has two properties which make it really useful for day-to-day engineering use:
- Large screen which shows which expression you entered. You can spot a typo easily, and then fix it!
- Unit support -- helps a lot, as it will ensure you are not adding meters to ohms. Or add meters and feet and it will just work.
HP's engineering was literally state of the art and unbelievably sophisticated for the day. At a time when computers ranged from big-box desk stations to air conditioned room fillers and cost thousands to millions of dollars, HP put a small programmable computer in your pocket.
They're not particularly useful for modern math, and if you really want the same features you can buy app emulations. But like any other brand of tech nostalgia, some people imprint on the machines they first played with. Any excuse to own a reinvention of the original hardware is going to appeal to them.
I've got both ti89 and hp50g. I seldom use the latter anymore.
TI-89 is slick, fast, responsive, a pleasure to use, something to study for its great UX.
HP50g is sluggish and a chore to use. It doesn't deserve the reputation.
This is particularly sad as the hp50g uses a relatively fast ARM cpu, whereas the ti-89 uses a plain 68000.
One reason would be that you can buy a TI-89 Platinum today (though not a "classic: TI-89), the 41 series was discontinued in 1990 and the 42 in 1995.
A second reason is that classic HP calculators are legendary enough that people managed to set up an apparently successful company based entirely on cloning and evolving classic HP calcs, that's literally what SwissMicros is: the company started in 2011 with an HP-15 clone.
Ti is still out there serving what market there is for Ti-style scientific calculators, not so for HP.
The HP50G is a fairly extensive ARM based computer not a calculator. It is ridiculously powerful. It is discontinued now in favour of something pretty and shiny but vastly inferior.
Similarly, TI is pushing some crap (TI-nspire) with vastly inferior UX to TI-89/TI-92.
Fortunately, TI haven't lost their minds yet. They still sell a version of the TI-89.
I am hoping that line does last. Otherwise, they'll be basically abandoning a market to whoever will have to pop up to serve it.
I’ve taken to stock piling HP48GX’s when they turn up on ebay.
I've had hp50g for a long time, got a ti-89 recently and became enlightened.
Don't knock it until you've tried it. Though as usual, the HP calculators that have this capability (48/49/50 series and 28 series) have a better UI for using units. But either way, this is a form of type checking, which is pretty universally regarded as a useful and worthwhile feature in programming languages. It catches mistakes from errant keystrokes, lowers the cognitive load by not requiring you to keep track of how many places to shift the decimal point when converting between metric units and obviously makes things a lot simpler when non-metric units creep into your calculations (because you can directly add feet and inches without problem), and encourages proper labeling of units for the quantities you end up writing down.
But there is a large degree of throwback HP fanboyism.
Anything non RPN sucks anyway.
TI's a fine calculator... for a middle school student.