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

[Liam Hays]

I learned to use RPN and about HP calculators in general from an HP-32S, a wonderful little machine. Compared to that, the 35s is vastly more powerful in terms of capability---complex support beyond just arithmetic, vectors, equation and system solving in a natural way, a clear and readable two-line screen, a significantly more advanced version of the 32S' programming language, and enough memory to put all that to good use.

And therein lies the problem. The 35s is so darn close to being a nearly perfect machine. In my opinion, if HP had done these three things, bugs like the checksum bug, cosine bug, and self-test problems would be nothing more than an inconvenience:

1. Fixed the keyboard. When I pulled by 35s out of its packaging, the R/S, GTO, and XEQ keys already looked like they had been used for years, and just days later, the right-shift key decided it needed extra force to register. While the actual keypress feel of the keyboard is fine, to me, fixing the actual key sensors should have been number one on HP's list.
2. Made complex support more than half-baked. Having a dedicated i key is fine, but if I can't take a square root of a negative number and get a complex answer out, I would rather have STO and RCL as dedicated keys instead. (On that topic, using the final layout, they could have at least made the MODE key shifted, and moved STO to its own key).
3. Finally, given the poor thing a processor greater than the 6502 or whatever is in there. A few months ago, I tested the integration speed between the 35s and the 32S, using the example from the 32S, and the 32S finished in three times the speed of the 35s. The kind of math operations the 35s supports demands speed, which is readily available today and probably was in 2007.
   

On the topic of speed, this page ranks the performance of the 35s at 9.5, only about three times greater than the HP-41, released 28 years before (though comparing the 35s to the 41C is a completely different ballgame). All in all, I think that the HP-35s is a good calculator, but the problems it suffers from are severely debilitating. This is really a shame, since it's probably the last standard scientific calculator we'll ever get from HP.

Anyway, I'll be quiet now. PS: this is my first post here!