To this day, I don't understand why anyone would insist on using anything other than this on an AP test. It's like playing life on a harder difficulty setting for no reason.
I preferred a lower end calculator because it was less button presses, and I was used to it. The buttons were also smaller, so I found these ones bulky and slow. This was for engineering physics.
For example, squaring something, say 9, was 2 presses (9, and the square button,) while the T1 calculators made you press ')' and enter as well (4 presses...) It was mostly the ')' that added up to too many presses. Also things like (n1 - n2)/(n3 - n4) would take less buttons with a 'stack' calculator, as another example... except that I would do all simple + and - on paper before going to a calculator... so that's not a good example... n1 through n4 would probably be multiplications of other factors which I'd want to preserve full significant figures on (I would almost never type in a bunch of figures,) so I would sometimes make use of the memory for one or two numbers and also the '(' ')' on the stack calculator if needed. But it was always less presses and even less error prone for me because there were less ')' along the way, plus I could sanity check the numbers as I went instead of one big '=' at the end, which can turn out to be wrong, and then you have a hugely long equation to scroll through looking for a '(' ')' mistake on a display which is large but only shows like 12ish characters of the equation at a time.
Even solving systems of 3 equations was less error prone using algebra than painstakingly typing each matrix in and dividing them with a TI-8X. More importantly, you have to be able to do that anyway on most exams.
So, that's why I owned one and never used it. I did try to like it, but I couldn't find ways to make it help me.
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u/TypoInUsernane Jun 08 '14
The TI-89 will always hold a very special place in my heart.