and now for something completely different...

[Claudio L.]

(03-19-2015 03:09 AM)MarkHaysHarris777 Wrote:  There is a considerable market sphere which HP has forgotten about (nor cares about). These people are in their fifties or sixties (remember the fifties and sixties) and want a 'real' hand-held scientific calculator with rotate and click buttons, executes in RPN, and has a special kind of wow factor.

In the fifties and sixties? There's many professionals, much younger than you think (I'm not even in my 40's yet), which need and use calculators every day. The "market" you mention is definitely there and is not small, but... it's not a consumer market, it's business and not a group that buys new hardware all the time.
The only profitable market in calculators is students buying their first machine, and upgrading it as they grow. Once they become professionals, they buy one machine and never change it (I should know, my 50g is 9 years old, I only bought a second one last year as a spare, 8 years later).
In that regards, selling calculators is more like selling mattresses than other tech items. If you sell a quality product, you won't see the client come back for many years. As a client, you buy one item and unless you outgrow it, you don't buy another one for quite a few years.
A mattress is just some foam and some springs, ever wonder why they are priced so high?. To make it a profitable market, calculators for professionals should become as expensive as mattresses.
I don't think HP has forgotten about that market, it's that selling one calculator every 8 to 10 years is not in their best interest (unless they could price those machines in the several hundreds like they did when that "market" was booming).
Perhaps an idea would be to sell the Prime hardware with the current firmware for students, and then sell a separate firmware upgrade for professionals, for $200 more or so, all running on the same hardware. That would put the Prime in "mattress price" territory.