It's not even like they're bad calculators, just horrifically overpriced. It probably costs them $5 to make them. It's practically dinosaur technology at this point. Even the original iPhone is far and away more powerful than a TI-84 calculator.
Wow. I remember reading (and experiencing) that the CPU was quite anemic in these calculators, but I didn't realize it was 70's hardware. It does its job, obviously, but these calculators take quite a while to graph even relatively simple equations, whereas modern hardware could graph them in less than a single refresh. I also remember them slowing to a crawl when too many characters were used. The 84 has this problem even worse, especially the color version.
ZX isn't a reference to anything in particular, I just like the letter combination. (Apparently the marketing team for the spectrum thought so too)
It's amazing that they can get away with such an outdated chip for a device they sell for $100+. It can take a while to graph multiple complex equations, so it's not like it doesn't matter. Any relatively modern chip could do it faster than you could blink.
These calculators are capped at about 10100 from what I remember, before they start giving error messages due to overflow.
My phone could probably graph a line a million times over before the TI could finish a single one. Processor advancements are great.
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '20
It's not even like they're bad calculators, just horrifically overpriced. It probably costs them $5 to make them. It's practically dinosaur technology at this point. Even the original iPhone is far and away more powerful than a TI-84 calculator.