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

[Thomas Radtke]

(01-22-2021 01:24 PM)Peet Wrote:  What makes the 42s/50g so good and the 35s/Prime so bad?

Pioneers and especially the graphical models up to the 50g were developed with much more ressources if I'm not mistaken.

Tim et al. invested a lot of thoughts into the 35s, I'm sure about that. But it had not been extensively tested and lots of bugs and omissions slipped through unfortunately. HP users weren't used to this in 2007 (allthough there was the 33s, also with lots of bugs and little concept what to do with 32kB of RAM, and hardware problems with 49g and 49gII keyboards). But this 35s looked like a promise for a reborne series of professional calculators, which it wasn't. Really everyone back then was dissapointed, at least I cannot remember it had any friends after the 10th or so bug found within *weeks*.

Don't have the Prime, but what I read about it doesn't sound as if it were as consistently designed as the old RPL g-machines.

The 35s and the Prime both exist because there's a market in education. The 32SII was quite strong there, and so the 35s as a successor had to be similar, which was a good idea imo. At the same time, educational use didn't require HP to update anything as the capability of the 35s is not nearly used there and bugs will likely not show up when adding some numbers. Professional users were not in the target audience.

In two sentences: The old calculators worked for professionals better than later models and they still do. And this forum is full of scientists and engineers.