Re: HP's and TI's calculator output rate

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Re: HP's and TI's calculator output rate

>does anybody know why TI produced so many calcs
>the last years in relation to HP? Is HP sleeping? Why
>can one company think its worth the research and
>development for a new calc nowadays and the other
>big calc company seems to think, well, no market for
>calcs these days?
>
>Any opinions, comments, statements?
>
>Thanks,
>Stefan.

Somebody earlier said that if a company is making a lot of variations of
a product, maybe the products aren't of such great quality.  I somewhat
agree with that; I think that the TI calculators are in general of fine
quality, though I don't quite agree with some of TI's strategies...
coming out with a new model each year seems a bit silly to me...

First TI came out with the 81, then came out with the more powerful 85.
But then what?  People thought that the 85 was too complicated (?!?),
and TI took a step backward (IMO, anyway) and developed the 82.  And
then they developed the 83, a better 82, but not quite an 85.
Personally, I think that the time and development would have been better
spent producing the 86 (which, aside from the better ASM support and
increased memory, is pretty much an 85) or the 89.  The 86, I think, was
long overdue...

(And then there are the TI-80 and the 73...)

I bought a TI-85 four years ago.  A year and a half ago, about 10 or so
rows of pixels from the middle of the screen suddenly went dead. (BTW,
does anybody have any idea why something like this would happen?
Occasionally a few rows might flicker back on, so they're not completely
disconnected... anyway...) The calculator was still useable, of course,
but it was rather annoying, since I couldn't see more than 3 entries in
the display at a time, graphing was useless, the solver was harder to
use, ... Anyway, I use the TI a lot less in college than I did in high
school, and I now mostly use it as a scientific calculator.  Well, last
fall, I found out about the 86 and bought one to replace my 85.

I didn't know about the TI-89 at the time, though I wish I had, since I
would have instead waited a year and bought that instead.  Sigh.  Darned
yearly cycles.

- James
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