DM42 News

[Thomas Okken]

(12-04-2017 03:15 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  

(12-04-2017 06:28 AM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  To put this in perspective: when HP released their first handheld calculator, the HP-35, in 1972, they charged $395 for it. In 2017 dollars, that's roughly $2300. How much did you spend on your latest brand-new calculator?

That is a false equivalency. All electronics were far more expensive back then. My first color TV that I bought in 1972 would cost over $10K in today’s inflated dollars. The same could be said of my first Tandy microcomputer. When I bought my HP 35 in 1973, the price had just dropped to $295, but that still represented two weeks of my take home pay.

Higher prices mean higher margins.

(12-04-2017 03:15 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  As production costs came down, so did the prices of HP calculators, yet HP still managed to maintain high quality standards until the company lost its way in the new millenium. Meanwhile, companies like Apple still manage to maintain high quality standards, while remaining competitive.

Apples and oranges (no pun intended). Apple sells high-end smartphones. I paid $600 for mine three years ago, and it was the bottom-of-the-line model. But for that kind of cash, you expect a blazingly-fast CPU, lots of RAM and flash, cellular and WiFi and whatnot, and all that in a package that is sturdy enough to be carried in a jeans pocket every day, even with no protective case.

And what about calculators? If enough people were still interested in buying something like the 50g, I'm sure HP would be happy to keep making them, just like they're still making the 12C. But while smartphones are an extremely popular product with high margins, calculators are a shrinking, low-margin market. I don't find it surprising that HP calculator quality isn't what it used to be, I'm more surprised that they haven't abandoned that market altogether.