Prime's current availability for purchase?

[nlj]

After a recent misadventure on the HP website and in the HP (US) online store, I'm wondering what is the "normal" way to buy an HP Prime? Is one supposed to buy through a dealer in the educational market? If so, how does one go about finding one?


There follows, for those who are interested (or have nothing better to do than read a short epic), a blow-by-blow account of my misadventure, culminating in an HP sales person claiming that "the HP Prime has been discontinued".

The saga began when I discovered that Best Buy in the States sells the Prime but that they won't ship outside the US.

It occurred to me that I might be able to buy a Prime directly from HP (from their online shop), or failing that, that they would be able to provide a list of dealers who sell it.

Well, a visit to the HP (US) online store failed to turn up the Prime, nor indeed was I successful (at that time) in finding any calculators there at all.

My next idea was to go to the product page for the Prime on the HP website and from there find a list of dealers. Maybe I was having a Bad Search Day, because it seemed improbably hard to find the page for the Prime on the HP website, but eventually I turned up two pages,

The first page [1] seems to be the main product page for the Prime. It has a "Shop" button right at the top. Perfect!

However, clicking on that button took me to the top-level page of the HP (US) store [2] where I had had the frustrating and fruitless search for the Prime earlier in the day. No sign of a Prime there.

[1] https://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/prim...rview.html
[2] https://store.hp.com/us/en

The second page [3] seems to be the main product page for calculators on the HP website. At the top of it is a headline that says "Introducing [sic] HP Prime Graphing Calculator" (although this headline is not a link and it seems to have no content underneath it). Beside the headline there's a "Shop Online" button. "Ah, here we go!" I think.

But no. This link goes to another page [4] at the HP (US) store, which seems to be the calculator department.

That seems promising at first, but only seven calculators are listed there (10BII+, 10S+, 12C 12C Platinum, 17BII+, 35S, and 300S+), no Prime. Notably, the 17BII+ is listed as out of stock, which suggests that the Prime is never sold here rather than merely being out of stock.

[3] https://www8.hp.com/us/en/prodserv/calculator.html
[4] https://store.hp.com/us/en/cv/accessorie...?cat=Hfz5e

I wondered why I had never found this calculator department when I was searching the store for the Prime, and discovered that it is a sub-department of "Displays and Accessories" which cannot, I think, be reached from the top level of the store because from there the available departments are "Top Deals", "Laptops", "Desktops", "Business PCs", "Printers", "Monitors", and "Accessories", and neither "Monitors" nor "Accessories" contains any calculators (or sub-departments).

In any case, no Prime.

[I reported the broken "Shop" and "Shop Online" buttons to HP. That was two weeks ago. Checking today, the only change they have made is that the "Shop" button at [1] now goes to [5] which is the "HP Accessories and Monitors" department of the store (yet another department that doesn't seem to be listed at the top level of the store), and from here the bewildered navigator can actually drill down to the "Calculators" department at [4].]

[5] https://store.hp.com/us/en/cv/accessories

Next, I used the store's online chat to talk to a sales representative who told me that "the HP Prime has been discontinued already".

I don't know what they meant by "already", but in any case this was rather shocking news.

The blow was ameliorated only by the hope that they might perhaps be lying -- as I find people in retail sales often do nowadays rather than admit ignorance on any matter.