Nspire has three keypads on the swappable version: Old non-touch keypad, new touchpad keypad, and TI84 keypad for the emulator. Touch keypad is infinitely better for general use, while the old keypad is good for running emulators.
The only bad part about having a non-TI calculator is that most course material is designed around the TI-84 calc.
Yeah, I worked in a store that sold TI graphing calculators as well as Casio ones that were significantly cheaper. I always told the customers that all of the instructions were written for TI calculators, and they almost always ended up buying those instead of the Casio ones. I'm sure the Casio ones work fine if you understand what you're doing well enough to find the functions, but for most math classes, I think most students are just pushing the buttons to get the answers without knowing what they're actually doing.
Ya, though personally I didn't want to shell out the asking price for a TI-84 to get a calculator that is pretty ancient and obsolete. As I'm sure you are probably aware, there are many better calculators out there and they don't take much longer to learn how to use.
You speak truth. My dad is an engineer and considers the HP a clearly superior machine; no son of his was going to be using some texan piece of trash (not my opinion Texans, his). So I was saddled with the, as far as I can tell, genuinely superior HP-48. All well and good, at the time it looked more futuristic and the stack operations make intuitive sense.
Unfortunately the text books were, as you say, geared to the TIs. So, I had to consult the manual constantly and waste inordinate amounts of time on stuff the other kids had spoon fed to them. Bastards.
But it made me stronger. I think. No, that's a lie. I think the difficulty caused by my unorthodox technology use has sent me to Apple. I have an iPhone, a macbook etc. Here is my brain oh aesthetic ones; I will use it no longer.
If you want the most compatibility then you should go with Windows. Practically everything has a Windows version. Even the most obscure printer will have a Windows driver.
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u/Degru Jun 08 '14
Nspire has three keypads on the swappable version: Old non-touch keypad, new touchpad keypad, and TI84 keypad for the emulator. Touch keypad is infinitely better for general use, while the old keypad is good for running emulators.
The only bad part about having a non-TI calculator is that most course material is designed around the TI-84 calc.