Why are the HP Prime and HP-35s so unpopular?

[Valentin Albillo]

Peet Wrote:Why are the HP Prime and HP-35s so unpopular?

Many replies here have stated more or less that "it's a matter of taste and usage".

True. But there's another factor, which for me is the essential one: it's a matter of trust.

I can trust all the classic models, from the HP-21 to the HP-42S and of course the HP-71B. They do have their share of bugs but they're well known and well documented, none of them are catastrophic and most are very rarely encountered, if at all. In practice this means that you can use them confidently, without the machines resetting unexpectedly once and again for no known reason, and with the peace of mind that comes with knowing you won't suddenly lose your programs to a nasty bug and even better, that barring physical *hardware* malfunctions your programs will continue to run over time as they always did, producing the exact same results in a deterministic way. In short: you can trust the machine.

That desirable state of affairs doesn't apply to either the Prime or the HP-35S. The latter not only has a very ill-devised and incomplete intruction set, with abysmal support for complex numbers and vectors, very basic and essential functionality sorely missing, and incredible inefficiencies everywhere (such as numbers in program lines being treated as if they were equations (!!), which slows down execution by 10x or more if used within a loop), but additionally has lots of bugs, some of which do cause the loss of all your painfully entered programs which thus must be re-entered and re-checked anew, and others do *change* some code in your programs causing them to perform incorrectly, which you might notice or (much worse) not. You can't trust the results and after being bitten several times by this you get fed up and simply put out the beastie in a drawer for good.

As for the former, the Prime, same tune. It has zillions of bugs already reported and in all probability there are zillions of bugs yet to discover, so again the question arises: Can you trust the results you get ? Can you trust that your programs will run the same and produce the same results after the next firmware update ?.

My answer to these questions is "No and No". I would never trust for serious work the results returned by the Prime without redoing them in a wholly different machine and checking if they do match. And if I have to do that to get peace of mind I might as well use a trusted machine from the get go and give the Prime a miss.

Worse still, after fighting the known bugs and the picky syntax of the miriad functionalities and their many caveats and inconsistencies, you may have your long, complicated technical Prime program finally running fine and thoroughly checked, then sooner or later an update internally changes something or reintroduces/creates bugs while attempting to correct other bugs, and without warning your program now either doesn't compile/run or much worse, produces incorrect results which might easily go unnoticed and may take you lots of time to find and debug only to discover that it wasn't your fault after all but this or that update messing things up.

The bottom line: you can't trust the results for serious work.

And as I said, it's a matter of trust.

V.