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

[rprosperi]

(02-03-2021 11:03 PM)Peet Wrote:  The often-mentioned bugs will hardly have any real disadvantages for anyone, as they only occur in cases that other calculators either cannot or that limit the real benefit only slightly. The criticisms of the programming options are negligible in view of the lack of mass storage.

Of the long list of bugs (22+ in Pauli's list alone), I agree almost all of them will never be encountered or noticed by most users.

But the checksum bug is unforgivable and effectively nullifies reliably entering programs. Old-timers will ask "what did you do to check your programs before machines had this built-in feature to verify them?" which is a reasonable thing to ask. But even after checking the program statements for the umteenth time, if the calculator tells me it's wrong (not consistent with some previously published listing with checksum provided) I'm going to have a tendency to believe it, especially if I'm new to this machine.

When I bought mine new in 2007, happy as a clam at acquiring a new HP RPN machine after so long, the first 3 times I entered a non-trivial program from a list, I could not get the checksum to match. And each time, after checking the code by stepping through the listing and still not getting the right checksum, I basically reset the machine and entered it again. And again. Even worse, I would get different checksums almost every time.

I've not looked back at it since then. Nice looking machone, happy to have one (2 actually, 1 for each case style) for the collection, but that bug is enough for me to ignore it.