HP Prime: The Logic of Purchasing

[Sukiari]

(04-02-2015 07:18 AM)Joe Horn Wrote:  Yeah, NOW they do, after the bugs in the early versions got ironed out, which took many years and many revisions. And not only were bugs removed, but missing features got added too. At least that's certainly true of the 48 and 50, which (unlike the 12C) are very complicated graphing calculators, like Prime.

The 48G / GX, to my knowledge, did not have any major showstopper bugs when it came out. Of course there were minor bugs that were fixed over time. But the 48 series was birthed in a different era, where customers would not accept a beta product that had a large number of problems on release with promises to fix them with Internet-delivered updates at some point in the future. One glaring issue that I have with the Prime is that the CAS and the "home" modes are different. Why? It looks to me as if this decision was made because the CAS was already more or less done, and it was just an easier way to get the features into the machine at the expense of usability. I'm sure you know that the 49/50G has no such separation of modes - there is one interface and you can use your CAS and your other calculator functions from within it. For years on this board Casio was derided because of this very issue - everything was in its own mode and they didn't play well together.

Quote:In that case, you should certainly wait as many years to buy a Prime as elapsed between the product announcements of the 48 and 50 and your purchase of them. That way you'll be giving the Prime the same chance of being "complete" as the 48 and 50 eventually became. The reason that so many people at MoHPC got Primes right away is because most of us are both "early adopters" of technology in general, and fans of HP calculators specifically. That's why I had an HP 48 version "A", and a beta 50g, neither of which had the "finished quality" you see in your 48 and 50. What does the VERSION command return on your 48G? "R"? Aha! See what I mean?

It may now be true that the MoHPC members comprise the majority of HP's calculator customers. In the old days, many people from a huge array of fields sought them out because they offered functionality that other calculators did not. Let's be honest here - HP's competition is not TI and their textbook aid market. It's Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab that HP needs to target and beat with better usability and features. People who already have a working, stable, mature CAS on their phone won't likely accept a beta product in a new hardware platform unless it's better.

Of the people here who bought a 67, 41/42, or 48 series machine - did they buy them because they wanted to be early adopters? Or did they buy them primarily because the tool was useful for their daily work? I realize that HP is taking a stab at the school calculator market - it is huge - but to make any inroads there would take a miracle. Meanwhile the RPN-trained professional engineering, surveying, and general sciences market doesn't even have a feature-complete RPN mode.

A beta quality student school calculator might be just the thing if you're a calculator enthusiast but I'm not sure that this can be a bread and butter market for HP. In any event, again I'm not trying to lay the blame for what is ultimately, a poor business decision, at the feet of the Prime's developers. They did not make the call to release the product before it was ready. And I'm not ruling out the possibility of buying one myself some day either, but as you say it might be a decade before it's done "enough" to consider for my needs.

One final thought I have, though - HP used to be a company that had a reputation for making the highest quality products one could buy. While the 48 series had bugs, it was also so far above and beyond the competition that they seemed minor in comparison. The HP-48, in all its incarnations (including the 49 and 50 in my opinion), is a legendary product and people actually love those gadgets. It'd be great to see that standard of quality again and it would be great for both business and corporate pride. A superb quality pocket calculator with real buttons running a world class CAS, with RPN for the millions of people still holding onto their 48s and 49s and 50s for dear life would sell like hotcakes, but the Prime isn't it (yet?).

In any event don't be too hard on me. I'm only telling it like I see it, and while I'm relatively new to HP's calculator products I do have perspective on this issue from a number of angles.