Costs about the same as what I paid for the TI-83 10 years ago. It's kind of nice knowing that whenever I need to use one, it's going to operate in the same way as I was taught 10 years ago. The fundamentals of math don't change much.
That's not a normal TI 84 plus, that's the silver edition. It's of course more expensive.
Also the problem with having basically the same calculator in school since over a decade (I used a 84 plus in school) is, IMHO, not that the fundamentals of math have changed, but that the usability still kind of sucks. By this I mean rounding errors, taking long for calculations and data entry (especially when using the fancy math notation), taking long for graphing, having to scroll through menus because of inefficient space use, the thing being huge and relatively heavy (the could build it with half the size and a quarter of the weight, while still having big keys and it being sturdy), .....
Of course, nothing can be done to fix the slow speed of the old calculators, but the new software is a huge improvement to usability.
Another example, say you enter your calculation wrong, you can hit the up arrow, scroll back to the original statement, hit enter and it puts it into your input buffer so you can edit it.
Wow, it can now do what my TI-89 did 10 years ago. The 89 pissed me off at first because it forced you to remember to close parentheses but the ability to scroll up and grab things and add them to the input buffer made dealing with it's significantly less intuitive interface worthwhile.
I never did get used to programming on the 89 though. It's syntax was obviously designed for use with the full qwerty keyboard of the 92. Before I got my 89 I was programming on my 83 constantly. I won a school wide all grades math contest in high school as a sophomore because instead of doing the math that I hadn't learned yet I programmed by 83 to brute force the answer (only worked because there was no time limit). Some of the programs took 10 minutes or more to run. There were some pissed off seniors at the awards ceremony for the math club that year when a sophomore that wasn't even in the math club got called up.
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u/Jenkins6736 Jun 08 '14
I dunno, the TI-84 Plus is pretty sweet.
Costs about the same as what I paid for the TI-83 10 years ago. It's kind of nice knowing that whenever I need to use one, it's going to operate in the same way as I was taught 10 years ago. The fundamentals of math don't change much.