When it comes to graphing calculators, the only name most people know is Texas Instruments, better known as simply TI. You would think that with all the modern handheld stuff we have that can compute great deals of information (like smartphones), calculators wouldn’t have a place in the world anymore, but they still do and students in the tens of thousands buy TI calculators every year – possibly every semester.
Why are graphic calculators still necessary? It mainly has to do with the buttons. Yes, you can do graph-style calculation on a smartphone, but the unfortunate part is you have to go through a sea of menus to find certain functions while the TI has just about everything immediately accessible right in front. Calculators may not be ‘cool’ or pretty (other than the fact TI’s come in multiple colors), but they get the job done because they’re designed as tools first and foremost.
If you think that once a company releases a calculator that there would never be an OS update, that’s not true for TI as they just released 2.55MP for the venerable TI-84 Plus, originally released all the way back in 2004.
For those of you who haven’t used a TI graphing calculator in a long time, the TI-84 is actually pretty darned close to being a laptop in some respects. It has USB, the ability to run apps (which includes games) and can even give presentations with TI-Presenter.
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Smartphones would be impractical anyway for school use. I never had a graphing calculator in high school because I couldn’t afford it, but I had a math teacher that let me borrow one of hers for class just for the fun of programming with it. I had a lot of down time in that class because I was the only one that did work, hehe xD