The actuel Prime future...

[Manolo Sobrino]

Companies sell products for profit. The market for non-educational devices is small to nonexistent and it's more or less covered already.

And most of the people buying calculators do it because they are required to do so and couldn't care less.

The point I don't like here is expecting that companies do what is good for the product. Too naïve, most of them don't do that. They do what they perceive is good for sales, that's how the world works. Believing that they do care is just a product of successful public relations/advertisement and your expected mindset as a consumerist sheep.

Frequently your interests stand in the way of theirs. The funny thing is that they still might expect you to play along and buy their stuff, so in an indeterminate future you might have the product you are paying for right now but not getting really... Yeah, right, so much for asymmetric brand loyalty.

But people can do something about it, and that has to do with the other underlying assumption: that only those companies can make stuff. That's not true, we have free software made by folks that do care and because of it just wouldn't conform. That's a very good thing, not only it's healthy for your freedom, it's good for the competitiveness of all parts involved. A big "Thank you, Bernard" is due here.

If people are willing to get the calculator they want their only hope is to do it themselves. And they can, you don't need to own a big factory.

I don't know if the graphing calculator concept by itself makes sense any more. We are not in the 90s, people have computers in their pockets and there are better computational environments to do it. We should be thinking about more interesting devices sharing the virtues of calculators: portable, dependable, solid haptic interface, no need to worry about running out of batteries, good numerical libraries and the capability to write code on it. A modular approach makes sense. You have a skeleton and there it goes a keyboard module, a low power cpu, a beefier one, I/O modules, screen ones... All in a kit DIY way. I can see many applications for such devices, calculators being one of them.

Education is a big broken problem almost everywhere, I don't think you can fix it with calculators (beyond simple scientific ones, I even doubt they are a good idea for students), let those companies have it. If you offer a solid general purpose alternative, it will find its way to a sound education, maybe not to school.