Author Topic: TI-83 Plus moves to TI-84 Plus case in France  (Read 18222 times)

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Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: TI-83 Plus moves to TI-84 Plus case in France
« Reply #30 on: February 22, 2013, 02:56:13 am »
It's exactly that, yup. They'll go the music and movie majors' way: try and criminalize their customers instead of adapting themselves to the shifts in the marketplace, with new business models where they can't milk customers as much as they used to.
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Offline DrDnar

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Re: TI-83 Plus moves to TI-84 Plus case in France
« Reply #31 on: February 22, 2013, 03:21:25 am »
And after all, since when did TI made sense?
They made sense in the 90s. Paying more than $100 for a TI-83+ was perfectly reasonable in 1997. A TI-83+ back then might well be the only computer a student owned; indeed, for many families, it was likely the only user-programmable computer in the house. The TI-83+SE was a nice upgrade over the TI-83+. However, the increasing presence of the personal computer and advances in portable consumer electronics have made the devices nearly obsolete. The only reason a student should use a graphing calculator rather than a smart phone is the graphing calculator is approved for classroom use.

But, I think the TI-83+ can still have a market presence. If the MSRP for the TI-84+ was dropped to around $30, TI could still turn a profit, and students would be more likely to buy a real calculator. Moreover, they aren't capitalizing on its educational use correctly. They should add a blinking test-guard LED to the TI-84+CSE and switch to an eZ80, or at least one of the other more advanced derivatives of the Z80. The eZ80 would make the TI-84+CSE faster and therefore more pleasant to use. Moreover, they could develop new software for it cheaply using C, furthering its educational potential, while simultaneously maintaining compatibility with existing software. Namely, the OS itself could run on an eZ80 without substantial changes. (But, it would be wise to deprecate the paging functionality. That might not play well with pipelining, because the memory mapping change might not reach the memory mapper until after subsequent instructions have already been fetched. This is not a hard problem to overcome.)
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: TI-83 Plus moves to TI-84 Plus case in France
« Reply #32 on: February 23, 2013, 02:27:57 am »
The issue though is that if there is ever a severe economy crisis worldwide one day, and I really mean something as bad, if not worse than what happened in 1929-39, and unemployment rate reaches 30% or something, and 10 years projections shows that it has no hope of recovery, then they would really have to rethink their pricing, because then I doubt anyone would buy calcs that cost more than $29.99 anymore.

That or if there is ever a big company that decided to venture into education and compete head-on against TI and Casio with more powerful or cheaper calcs and managed to convince schools to consider their new calcs as an option, then TI would have no choice to rethink their strategy.