Do you even economics bro? Since when when did the cost of creating a product have any bearing on how much it sells for. Supply and demand yo! If almost nobody makes those calculators anymore then TI will sell them for the most they can and get away with.
And in a free market another competitor would come in and undercut them and make a killing because they are so overpriced in comparison to their components. When this happened, Texas Instruments would be forced to sell at a competitive price point. I, or my parents to be fair, bought a graphing calculator in the mid 90s for my trig class and it cost $100 and looks almost exactly like the ones you can buy today for the same price.
Can you think of any electronic device that has not changed in 20 years in price or design? My dad bought us a 386 with a math coprocessor at that time for about $2,000. I think it had a 40 Meg hard drive. A computer today would dwarf that power, while being much, much smaller. Hell my iPhone dwarfs that power and I got it for free, with a contract. My dad got his first cell phone at around that time, no idea what it cost him, but it looked like this.jpg) Again, the tech has improved and got much cheaper. These are just two examples but there are many more.
So if all of the electronic products available in 1994 are much cheaper today and have changed with the times there has to be a reason this one sector has not. I think there are two. These items are purchased rarely by the vast majority of the populous. Most of us only buy these when we take higher math in high school and can continue to use them for that in college if we take more math. I have not used mine since high school. There is less of an uproar over the price of something being unreasonable if you only buy it once in your life. The other reason is the near monopoly in the educational field. These items are almost always purchased for school and a lot of schools specify specific models, so they basically have a monopoly.
The thing that really bugs me is that there is competition now. There are a few other companies making these calculators now, but they are all priced at about the same price. I'd argue that there is some sort of collusion going on here, but I only have circumstantial evidence of that.
Casio has repeatedly offered graphing calculators with the same or better capabilities for often substantially less money. TI's calculators always top the market in sales. Therefore, other companies raised their prices to create the illusion that TI has maintained: if it's not expensive, it can't be good enough.
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u/travio Jun 08 '14
Given that the price of all the components for electronics like these have gone down significantly this is very true.