Why are the HP Prime and HP-35s so unpopular?

[Marco Polo]

(01-22-2021 03:28 PM)Peet Wrote:  If that were the case, then everything would be OK, but mostly I have a different impression. I have read negative comments on the Prime or 35s in many posts (often without any explanation), but I've never noticed that with the 50g or 42s. On the other hand, many hymns to the 50g an 42s, not so much to the 35s.

Even in this thread only disadvantages to the Prime or 35s were named, none to the 50g/42s. It almost seems as if the 35s and Prime are not recommended and the 42s and 50g are nearly perfekt and error-free.

For my personal needs the 35s and 42s are equal as daily used calculators and even 50g and Prime would be similar replacements for my 48g(+).

You should consider that the forum is mainly populated by long term HP calcs users and (this is true especially for 50g), the 42s and 50g are the top edge of the development of RPN and RPL calculators.
They both have bugs, but are very well known and in imho don't impact the everyday usability.
I don't know well the 42s, but i can say that the 50g has things i don't like if compared to the 48gx: i prefer the 48 screen header, the 48 has better layout, the 7-level stack screen should be optionally rearranged as 5-level with large font, the 50g menu are somewhat confused.

The 35s, mainly due to its external design, imho generates high expectations but unfortunately bugs and some strange "flaws" (the display, for example) did not satisfy the users. This is a real pity as the keyboard is pretty decent and the body is robust. A better firmware would have helped. I own one since 2008, but never fell in love with it. Maybe i cannot get used to RPN vs RPL stack paradigma (stack lift....).

I also tried the Prime as emulator, but gave up after some days: its design, with different enviroment for each task, the difficulty of passing variables to other environments, the lack of unit of measures in 48-like way are keeping me away.
In my opinion the 50g is the last HP calc aimed to engineers AND matematicians AND partially students, while the Prime dropped the engineers.