Some people can't afford a TI-83 for their children if it's a requirement in math class. To assume that everyone taking public transit wants / needs / is able to afford even a $300 device to get them the last mile seems a bit out of touch with the typical mass-transit-dependent demographic.
It's not like TI is selling exactly the same TI-83 now, and it seems that most of their R&D effort and value comes from software.
You can easily duplicate the hardware these days, or even do everything in software but it seems that high quality CAS software is pretty hard to make.
TI and Mathlab pretty much got a monopoly on that as it seems I haven't seen a single off-brand graphical calculator that actually worked.
Not even sure if anyone besides TI and to lesser extent HP are even making graphical calculators these days (HP ones are (or at least were) substantially more expensive.
So when you have a market monopoly and a product with very little obsolescence (graphical calculators can easily last 10-15 years these days) there's nothing to drive the market down.
The TI-8X series is also one of the few "certified" ones and they also have localized versions that disable certain features for countries that limit the use of "smart calculators" but don't ban them outright.
Huh? The R&D was paid off as soon as it completed. Money from completed projects funds R&D in the present; it doesn't retroactively fund R&D in the past.
Yes,R&D is technically paid off as soon as it completes, but paying off the R&D is an investment and the company obviously wants a return on this investment.
But the price of a calculator is totally unrelated to the cost of the R&D associated with the calculator. The original point was nonsense.
The company wants its return to be as large as possible. Speaking in more sensible terms, they want to get as much money as they can regardless of whether they've reached a magic internal accounting threshold or not. R&D just has no relevance at all to product pricing.
Good point. It certainly wouldn't apply to everyone. Consider it additive. Don't take away the slow and steady stop every block buses. Just add more express options.
While there are many people who couldn't afford the calculator. There are also a lot people who could swing a $300 scooter but not afford a well maintained car. They would certainly enjoy to cut some time off their commute.
You can find used ones for 30-40$.
It's also a sad day when those are a requirement, graphical calculators (or any calculator with CAS) were banned for all of me high school exams, and for most of my uni courses as well and I'm thankful for that especially seeing how many people can't plot a function on their own these days.
