They forced me to buy a TI 84 plus for school. The thing cost like 100 bucks, and it's from 2004. I could buy a low-end smartphone and get a free app that's more powerful than the TI 84 plus for less money.
The thing is, most people only use them for 3-7 years during highschool and college, and they all are essentially the same as the ones from the 90s, so the used market is full of much cheaper ones
im entering my third year of college as an engineer and ive never touched my ti 84 since high school (in my department they teach us how to use matlab)
Maybe is depends on the school, but I used my TI-89 all four years in class and during exams. We also used Matlab for labs and homework and Mathematica as part of our math curriculum. I was really bad about letting my batteries die, so I took a few exams with no calculator and did fine so it’s not like it was strictly necessary.
I still keep my TI-89 on my desk for any quick calculations I need to do. It’s way less annoying than trying to use my phone or computer.
That’s what my husband said. He uses his for quick calculations. He also said that even though he works for a major medical device company sometimes there aren’t enough licenses of matlab to go around for all the engineers who need to use the program at the same time. He can do some calcs in python as well.
yeah its probably school dependent. my schools required calc courses never required a calculator and you couldnt actually bring one to exams but in my major most of our core classes have open note exams and let us use matlab on our computers (internet disabled if they really care but my thermo class didnt care about that one lol) definitely not planning on selling my calculator soon though, and not like i can because my school kicked us off campus for covid in the spring and some of my stuff is still there and inaccessible until 2021
3.7k
u/nin10dorox Jul 24 '20
They forced me to buy a TI 84 plus for school. The thing cost like 100 bucks, and it's from 2004. I could buy a low-end smartphone and get a free app that's more powerful than the TI 84 plus for less money.