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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

"We have to keep evolving on this platform, but it can’t be innovation for the sake of innovation,” said Peter Balyta, president of Texas Instruments’ calculator division. “While it’s tempting for us to build in WiFi, Bluetooth, audio, a camera, a whole bunch of things, we could do, but teachers don’t want us to. And it’s because we want to have a tool that kids can use in a classroom, on their way home, at home when they’re doing homework and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.”

What a bunch of crap. They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price. No one is asking for a camera or audio.

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> and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.

This is the most important part. Cheating is probably the primary reason these are used and not computers/smartphones etc. That is their niche. Test taking. With that, if you change the form factor etc, it becomes more difficult for test administers to recognize etc, and more power allows for programs that can be more "creative" and how they find answers to problems.

The tool is a perfect reflection of being built for a very particular market.

I use to write programs in HS for these things that helped me during math tests.

Chances are, if you were able to program the algorithms required to solve the problems, you understood them well enough or more than enough to pass the course.

Yes but you can copy a program more easily than you can "copy" the knowledge behind it.

What happens when one kid writes a quadratic solver and gives it to half the class?

Definitely not the case for me. I had as many books and websites as I needed while creating those programs, but did not have them available during tests.

I would occasionally bury stuff in programs that shouldn't have been there. I was afraid that the teacher might look at my programs and if there was a functional program, would realize what I was doing, so I'd usually have a code language that I could easily decipher but wouldn't be easily figured out by someone else.

I probably gave my teachers too much credit, but the classes that could use calculators were usually taught by teachers who knew about programming the things.

I am a developer today because I used to write little programs that helped me cheat in high school and college.

During college, we used Ti-89 calculators, like the ti-83, but with more ram/rom, higher resolution display etc. It has simple apps such as a notepad and spreadsheet.

Our professor didn't worry about cheating, he just designed the tests while keeping in mind probably every student had written notes on their calculator. In fact, he allowed us to have all our notes and books with us while performing the test, just like you would do in the real world when tackling a difficult problem.

Thereis no reason to write a test that requires a calculator, so the the is no reason to demand a hobbled calculator.

Well, they did all of those things with the Nspire stuff, but for whatever reason it hasn't become as popular as the 84/89.

http://education.ti.com/en/us/products/calculators/graphing-...

One of my old math teachers won a top of the line NSpire.

She showed her students, everyone poked at it for a bit, and then it was never used again. It didn't provide much additional educational use.

"add rechargeable batteries"

That would be an epic fail. Like most of us, I carried around a 4-pack of AAA for my calc (at least thats what the TI-81 took) and if the battery finally ran out during a test, no problem, 30 seconds later you're back on the air. Also the teachers sold batteries or you could bum them off a neighbor. With rechargeable, I guess you just fail?

Also rechargables are carefully value engineered to fail after a couple years, so that would increase costs quite a bit. A school system that bought a couple TI84 a decade ago can keep on using them today with COTS walmart batteries, but sealed rechargables means they would have to keep buying them every couple years. With careful value engineering the mfgr could likely get the lifetime down to a bit over a year, and sell kids a new calc every single august for school.

Note that these calcs, at least the TI-81, were not like smartphones. A set of batteries lasted at least a couple months even with some game playing. I wrote some text adventures and others wrote little arcade games and still we got over a month at a time. The -81 was extremely crude as a programming language even compared to 1980s home computer BASICs.

Hell,if they kept the same price and added the sleekness, power, and recharge functionality I'd feel a little less taken advantage of.

Yeah. Completely button- and menu-compatible, but with a much better screen and faster CPU. The screen resolution is really inexcusable.

If it works great for what people need it to do, why change it? I like things that do their core purpose very well, and this apparently does.

'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' - Henry Ford

> They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price.

It could cost easily a tenth of what it does. Compare the Shenzhen article on the front page yesterday which mentions full cellphones available for $9.

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