Next Generation Calculator

[Liam Hays]

Hi. I noticed that this thread got revived and thought I'd add something.

Eddie W. Shore Wrote:1. No need to rely on available internet or Wifi. Useful for space flights, air flights, and certification tests which don't allow cell phones.

This. Until Skynet (or TI? ) has taken over all technology and the entire education system, the school environment will always demand dedicated math machines. As commonplace as phones are, I'm sure they're not omnipresent in every school, for any number of reasons, and the distraction potential means that they're suboptimal for an education device.

Max Stone Wrote:There's no motivation for HP to do anything new; we'll keep getting entry-level white label junk, the HP-12C will soldier on through more EOL HW revisions, and Prime will continue to evolve to support the blended-learning trend.

Paleontologists in three million years will find a 12C buried in a riverbed and call it "Lucy 2".

On a serious note, I've been thinking about something for a while: who besides us HP fanatics actually wants HP calcs? Who is it? Surely there's a market, because the calculator team still works for HP (they do, don't they?), but where is it?

For example, imagine you're just a "normal person", i.e., non-fanatic, who doesn't really know much about any calculator brand. You start with HP and Casio because you've heard good things about both brands. It takes 3 clicks to get to the calculator page on HP's site, and once there, all you're presented with are a couple of Casio knock-offs and $60 financial calculators (and neither the 35s nor the Prime, for some reason). For Casio, you need one click to get a calculator submenu, where you can choose whether you want a graphing, scientific, basic, or printing machine, and it's immediately clear that calculators are an important part of Casio's overall product line. You can then find something, just as good as HP's offerings, for less money. I sure wouldn't be interested in HP's selection with that kind of competition.

I can, and do, hope that HP will make future models. I don't want to be overly pessimistic, but like others have said, it's important to look at this for what it really is.

One more thing: to me, I've always thought that the name "Prime" almost suggests something final. It's like it's trying to be the last product, the last hurrah of something that was once much more.