HP Prime FW for 2023?

[Steve Simpkin]

“Don't design a calculator with schools in mind. Design one good enough to replace PCs and laptops for engineers, surveyors, and scientists.”

Is that realistic though? Engineers, scientists, technicians etc. didn’t stop using calculators en masse because they weren’t powerful enough. They stopped using them for many tasks because there were better tools available. I used scientific calculators at school and work for over 40 years. They were my primary engineering hand tool for much of that time. Even after I initially had access to a computer the calculator was a very useful engineering tool but over time, it’s usefulness to me grew less and less. My use of a calculator went from hours a day to almost never. I found myself trying to find a reason to use my HP-48SX because it had been my primary engineering tool for many years. Slide rules were a mainstay tool for over 200 years in the science/math/engineering fields before they were replaced by scientific calculators. Calculators, outside of education, had a much shorter useful lifespan in those fields. They are still useful of course, but now much less so.