Who better than us to analyze today's XKCD strip?



Alt text: "College Board issues aside, I have fond memories oi TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)"

So we've all certainly been there with the alt-text, I'm sure; I personally have tried the 3D grapher and the chatterbot, but not the stock market analyzer. He brings up a good point, albeit one we've been talking about for ages: TI is using about $5 of hardware maximum, plus whatever their manual, calculator case, and packaging cost them (which I'm sure is together more than the hardware itself), and selling it for near or over $100. Their margin on the Nspire is probably lower, but not much. Discuss.

He has the display size, RAM size, and proc speed wrong.

Indeed, which could have been remedied with 30 seconds of Googling or a glance at Wikipedia.

Not by much, in most of the specs.

Education Equipment is often over priced to begin with, but the constant price from 1996 to Present is an anomaly, especially when you can pick up those parts for a relatively cheap cost, find an illegal ROM online, install it and viola. A cheap TI calculator.

If TI were to lower the cost on it's Graphing calculators, do you think they'd drop it to 35 or 50?

Personally, I find it offensive, implying that messing with graphing calculators and having friends are mutually exclusive.

I also consider the lack of taking a few seconds of googling for correct specs or even fixing typos a sign of disrespect.

Ah, quite so, and me as well. Messing with graphing calculators is a sign of experimental spirit, curiosity, and programming/"hacking" capability. Having no friends is indicative of a lack of social skills. Sure, the two can overlap in a version of the classic chicken-and-egg (playing with his calculator because he has no friends? Has no friends because he's always on his calculator), but that's by no means the rule, nor, I'd claim, even the norm.

Agreed on this count as well.

Yeah, I have a problem with that too, my nspire was basicly 150$ for 2 calcs (but the emulation of a TI-84 sucxs)


Also, Kerm, I believe I have mentioned how my classmates are horrendously inferior to me, so they make fun of me to compensate for it.


Actually, once, some Kid made fun of TI-BASIC, so I told him that the "dont complain if you cant do it yourself" applies

I can't seem to find the typos.

xkcd sucks. Always has.

That's because I told him about them and he fixed them.

really?
That is a bit ignorant, definitely, and the stereotype is annoying, but at least he fixed them... (he could've changed the ~10MHz to 6MHz, though)

Since the 83+ series (implied from the LCD dimensions) can be either 6MHz or 15MHz, ~10MHz is not all that inaccurate of an average, so I didn't say anything.

I've calmed down from it...I have to learn to poke fun at myself about these things. And it's good for the community to have an outsider criticize TI for having overpriced calculators.

And one can easily see where he got the 62 pixels (last row inaccessible from BASIC, then he's a simple off-by-one error from the correct value), but I still think it's negligent of someone who has tens of thousands of readers to not take a second to check his facts. I suppose he could always claim that the characters were just recounting rough remembrances and it's their fault.

I think you're missing the point of the argument. Yes, if you have a 10 MHz, a jump to 16 is significant. But xkcd's argument was about scale. A difference of a few MHz is trivial considering that most things have increase by a factor of 10 or 100 and the TI 83-89 families could easily be at 100 MHz by now. And from experience, it would be nice thing for TI to do considering how little it'd cost them.

Welcome to Cemetech, aegis; I hope you enjoy your stay!

Regarding your point: I agree that he was arguing orders of magnitude, ie, 100 MHz to 2.X GHz, a factor of 20-30, in exchange for a decrease in price from $3000 to about $400 or $500 for a solid machine, a decrease of at least 5/6. Nevertheless, we're arguing that it wouldn't have taken that much longer for him to quote the correct figure of 16MHz. We're not arguing that 16MHz is a big difference from 10MHz in terms of performance, thus invalidating his point (well, I'm not, and I don't think anyone else is either).

He fixed the screen size.

I found it funny. It's just a joke anyway

I am too lazy to actually make my own post so instead I quote people and then don't say anything new

Why, xkcd explained of course. (Though admittedly that review is lacking the depth of this one).

In any case, when you pay for a TI calculator I suspect you are mostly paying for the software, not the hardware. For a specialised piece of software such as the TI-OS I don't think the price is hugely unreasonable.

I hope that we were one of the squeaky wheels that contributed to getting the grease.