I can't say I'm at all surprised, although I'm glad (unless I'm misreading?) that you were able to send letters to the TI executives. Did they bother to respond to you? I continue to enjoy my Casio Prizm, for what it's worth, and how Casio feels about the development community. To quote the marketing director that I chatted with:

Yup, we sent e-mails containing large blurbs of explicative text, written in English. It took me ~15 hours, i.e. way too much, to write them.


Not to me directly, at least.

One of the things that makes me like the Casio Prizm is the fact that I can transfer programs to it in Windows 98 (Yeah, I've gotten a bit of an upgrade since good ol' WFW). It also does not require a linking software that's almost impossible to find since a certain company wants you to use their pay-to-play Student Bloat-ware insted.

Indeed, TI's attitude about the Nspire linking software absolutely boggles my mind. It just makes so much sense that your calculator, like the Prizm, should present itself to computers as a mass storage device.

What irritates me the most, though, is how TI tries so hard to "hide" their TI-Nspire Computer Link software so that we need to use the Student Bloatware that can be installed only on one computer without purchasing additional licenses. If the link software were easy to find, I wouldn't mind it all!

Although, now that I have a Prizm, I like the USB flash drive functionality a lot more than any linking software. It makes things simpler for folks too, especially students.

I was going through some of the "training" for the Prizm, and it kept saying that you can read data in from a CVS ... it took me a while to get a handle that perhaps you can load files onto it just as they are on the computer -- Now THERE's a "novel" idea!

Also the student bloatware is problematic for those who bought an older model or an used model on Ebay, because then they're forced to buy the student software if it didn't come with their calc...

I am also annoyed with TI for related reasons to the main core of this thread. One way to send a srtrong message to TI is through Amazon. I have been posting this in a few places, just so that people are aware of this as an option:

If any of you are as annoyed as I am with the closed nature of the Nspire compared to the Casio Prizm or even earlier TI calcs, and if you happen to have bought your Nspire at Amazon as I did, write a review and let the world know. The manufacturers DO pay attention to Amazon ratings, as that is what many people use to decide what to buy. My own personal peeve is that I do research and write small to medium size programs in TI-Basic to test certain ideas, some of it to do with Signal Processing. I'm talking things like Fast Fourier Transforms.

The Nspire has the needed speed, but you can't start a graph at the end of a program run, automatically, like I could on the slower but well thought out TI-89. Everything is manual on the Nspire. My 'rant' is on Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A14BPYS1D1ZJS5/ref=cm_cr_pr_auth_rev?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview

It's best if you only do this if you bought your unit on Amazon, that way it wouldn't look like some group was stacking the cards against this product (it would look political, contrived or something). Nonetheless, used well, the Amazon product review feedback is one way of getting manufacturers to 'listen up'.

Mlytle0, thank you for the long and thorough post. I'm glad to hear you share my sentiments about the TI-Nspire, and I like your novel idea about sending a message to Texas Instruments. The Nspire definitely does have some decent hardware, but I feel TI did a very poor job in harnessing that power for the user, as you said. I imagine a day when you could run a Matlab-like language on your "calculator" (maybe "engineering handheld" at that point"), connect probes, use it as an oscilloscope, etc. More on that later, though. I've been testing out Casio's ClassPad, and have found its symbol CAS abilities, 3D graphing, etc to be quite powerful and intuitive. I'm surprised that it's not actually a more popular product, probably because of TI's overwhelming market presence.

It's because of market presence, and because it's aging as a calc by now. It was originally introduced in 2003; at that point, TI was very dominant in the market, and it didn't make much of a splash. Me, I'm hoping that it will eventually take more market share, because of better features and customer service. (And maybe a Prizm-Classpad :D)

It's certainly not aging in terms of features, and when you consider the longevity of calculators compared to normal technology, it is practically brand-new. The TI-83+, for example, is barely different than the TI-83, which was released over twenty years ago. The TI-83+ is still very much a relevant calculator in education.

The ClassPad isn't that popular probably because it's not allowed on standardized tests (it has a pen input, right?).

It does indeed have pen input, but standardized testing is far from the only reason to get a calculator, in my opinion. What about all the engineers who need it for classes where having a symbolic CAS is expected, not an unfair edge?

However, the majority (IIRC) of calculator users are high school students. Good point though.
Also:

The 83 was released in 1996. That's 16 years ago, not 20.

My problem is that I have over 150 programs for the TI-84 related to our already publishable text, About Mathematics (see www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~insrisg/AboutMathematics.html.) Translating those to the Casio programming mode would be a major job.

Now I find that the new TI-84 OS has glitches that make even simple programming difficult. Ex: Try Program:TEST For(I,1,4):Disp "GO":End and you will get an error message. This is nonsense.

Do you mean 2.53/2.55 MP?

Insrig: Actually, the Casio BASIC language is so close that it wouldn't take long for you to translate your programs.

At the Staples store here:

$124.96 for TI-83 Plus
$142.83 for TI-84 Plus
$149.99 for TI-84 Plus Silver Edition
$149.99 for TI-Nspire CX
$188.92 for TI-89 Titanium

They used to charge $194.99 for the TI-Nspire CX and $179.99 for the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. A few months ago, the respective prices were reduced to $179.99 and $149.99 and now the TI-Nspire CX is discounted to the same price as the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition.

I think the lower TI-84 Plus Silver Edition price is due to the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition arrival, but the TI-Nspire CX has been located in the clearance section of the store for half a year now. There's no doubt that there's simply no market for that calculator over here, although it is unclear if it is due to being locked down and harder to get started with or if it's due to the high price tag, which is inflated by the USA-Kicks-Canada's-A** tax that TI still charges to Canadian customers (something that Casio, Nintendo, Sony and to a lesser extent Microsoft has stopped doing over a year ago).

I've yet to see a single person out of the hundreds I have known since me and my classmates started to use calculators write a program more complicated than a quadratic equation solver. I don't even know where to buy a Casio Prizm, most people have 84s. Three people own nSpires in my entire high school. At least here, the 84 is still the dominant force, the nSpire is a tool of nerds, and the Prizm is literally nonexistent. Saying programmers can change any of that here is like saying the Know-Nothing Party has influence. Heck, even programmers in the plural is almost laughable, or would be if English had a dual.

I really don't understand why somebody should take the effort to seek out and switch to the Prizm because it's better at doing things that are not pure math when, for all intents and purposes, that is all that people do with the TI calculators they already have. TI's cross-curricular advertising has always confused me for the same reason

*Duel. Also, Google "TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition" and see what shows up in the top three or four results. TI cares what we have to say, because (ideally) TI cares about all of its customers, especially the vocal ones. TI likely wouldn't be abstractly bothered by their calculators being bad for programming, but they agree with us that they have a moral responsibility to promote STEM education. This country has a huge deficit of STEM talent, and so many of us got into STEM fields just by realizing we could program our calculators and make them do our bidding.

Your statement is pretty much anathema to the entire point of this community. People don't want to spend $150 on a device that is only going to be useful for calculating logarithms and drawing sine curves, especially when it's capable of so much more. If you can also use it to calculate titrations in Chemistry, to render gravity simulations for Physics, and to learn to make a Frogger game, why not push it to its extremes?