What Your Old Graphing Calculator Says About Technologies
Rabu, 24 Agustus 2011 by Android Blackberry
What Your Old Graphing Calculator Says About Technologies
Come with me back to teenagedom in 1999. You listened to Offspring (or the Backstreet Boys) on CDs inside a Discman. You made calls on a landline, which you probably just called "the telephone." It's achievable you had a beeper. You dialed up to the world wide web on a desktop laptop or computer. The Playstation was the most effective game system. And your calculator of selection was the TI-83 Plus.
Twelve years later, so considerably has changed. Beepers are gone, but cell phones are de rigueur. A tiny iPod Nano holds 180 albums of music. Broadband is everywhere and you may use a tablet or a laptop to surf the web. Videogames have gone from barely 3D to practically photorealistic.
In reality, each gadget a teenager is most likely to handle has changed. Except 1: the graphing calculator
The graphing calculator reached a kind of technological plateau in the late 1990s. A minimum of that is what Amazon customers are saying. Correct behind the TI-83 Plus is the TI-84 Plus, released in 2004. In one of the purest computing tasks imaginable -- calculations plus the graphic display thereof -- people pick out a decade old technologies.
You'd feel that had to do with cost, correct? The old stuff is affordable; the new stuff is high-priced. But that is not seriously true. The TI-83 Plus is listed at $79. The TI Nspire with touchpad, released in 2010, is listed at $65. So, persons are paying *more* for the older technologies.
But wait! This is technologies. It gets better all the time, proper? What provides? Let me recommend 3 probable factors.
Initial, for high school level math classes, the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus are basically fantastic. After all, the *material* hasn't changed (a lot), so if the calculators were superior sufficient for us 10 or 15 years ago, they're still great adequate to solve the math challenges.
Second, standardized test providers only permit a particular range of calculators to be employed. If they got too effective or complicated looking (seriously, the aesthetic is part of it), they could be banned, hurting their sales. Horizontally oriented calculators have been banned by the SAT, even if they've near identical functionality to vertically oriented models.
Third, and this is probably most crucial, teachers tend to advise a specific calculator or set of calculators, as well as the more of their students utilizing the same tool, the simpler it can be to teach them. That puts a drag on the alter in tools because the technological program in which they are deployed militates against rapid alter. TI runs a training organization (Teachers Teaching with Technology(T3)), which I'm positive helps the newer goods diffuse, but you can find a good deal of good factors for teachers not to follow the most recent calculator trends, beyond the basic desire to cut down calculator heterogeneity. If the upgrade cycle is slow, households can hand down calculators from older children to younger ones. Teachers can continue to use the same handouts, too, which could be pegged to the particular calculator. All these elements have produced competing touch for Casio and HP, I feel, too.
There have already been a couple of very big changes in calculators over the past couple decades. The TI-89, which became obtainable in 1998, let you solve equations together with your calculator (just like the TI-92, but you had been additional likely to be able to use it on tests). It was amazing and a major upgrade from the TI-84-level calculators.
Given that then, the greatest modifications have come in look and interface. Recently, Texas Instruments (TI) has been playing with a touchpad rather than buttons on the newish Nspire series. Those changes have gotten a mixed reception. This year, TI unleashed the greatest interface change because the introduction with the calculators themselves: a color screen.
Here's the thing. Some technologies don't change all that speedily for the reason that we do not will need them to.
Come with me back to teenagedom in 1999. You listened to Offspring (or the Backstreet Boys) on CDs inside a Discman. You made calls on a landline, which you probably just called "the telephone." It's achievable you had a beeper. You dialed up to the world wide web on a desktop laptop or computer. The Playstation was the most effective game system. And your calculator of selection was the TI-83 Plus.
Twelve years later, so considerably has changed. Beepers are gone, but cell phones are de rigueur. A tiny iPod Nano holds 180 albums of music. Broadband is everywhere and you may use a tablet or a laptop to surf the web. Videogames have gone from barely 3D to practically photorealistic.
In reality, each gadget a teenager is most likely to handle has changed. Except 1: the graphing calculator
The graphing calculator reached a kind of technological plateau in the late 1990s. A minimum of that is what Amazon customers are saying. Correct behind the TI-83 Plus is the TI-84 Plus, released in 2004. In one of the purest computing tasks imaginable -- calculations plus the graphic display thereof -- people pick out a decade old technologies.
You'd feel that had to do with cost, correct? The old stuff is affordable; the new stuff is high-priced. But that is not seriously true. The TI-83 Plus is listed at $79. The TI Nspire with touchpad, released in 2010, is listed at $65. So, persons are paying *more* for the older technologies.
But wait! This is technologies. It gets better all the time, proper? What provides? Let me recommend 3 probable factors.
Initial, for high school level math classes, the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus are basically fantastic. After all, the *material* hasn't changed (a lot), so if the calculators were superior sufficient for us 10 or 15 years ago, they're still great adequate to solve the math challenges.
Second, standardized test providers only permit a particular range of calculators to be employed. If they got too effective or complicated looking (seriously, the aesthetic is part of it), they could be banned, hurting their sales. Horizontally oriented calculators have been banned by the SAT, even if they've near identical functionality to vertically oriented models.
Third, and this is probably most crucial, teachers tend to advise a specific calculator or set of calculators, as well as the more of their students utilizing the same tool, the simpler it can be to teach them. That puts a drag on the alter in tools because the technological program in which they are deployed militates against rapid alter. TI runs a training organization (Teachers Teaching with Technology(T3)), which I'm positive helps the newer goods diffuse, but you can find a good deal of good factors for teachers not to follow the most recent calculator trends, beyond the basic desire to cut down calculator heterogeneity. If the upgrade cycle is slow, households can hand down calculators from older children to younger ones. Teachers can continue to use the same handouts, too, which could be pegged to the particular calculator. All these elements have produced competing touch for Casio and HP, I feel, too.
There have already been a couple of very big changes in calculators over the past couple decades. The TI-89, which became obtainable in 1998, let you solve equations together with your calculator (just like the TI-92, but you had been additional likely to be able to use it on tests). It was amazing and a major upgrade from the TI-84-level calculators.
Given that then, the greatest modifications have come in look and interface. Recently, Texas Instruments (TI) has been playing with a touchpad rather than buttons on the newish Nspire series. Those changes have gotten a mixed reception. This year, TI unleashed the greatest interface change because the introduction with the calculators themselves: a color screen.
Here's the thing. Some technologies don't change all that speedily for the reason that we do not will need them to.
Much as we like to tell the story with the Globe Changing So Fast, most of it doesn't. Look at vehicles or power plants or watches or power strips or paper clips. The adjustments are within the details, and they come slowly. But that's ok. More alter is not necessarily superior.
Possibly the real question to ask about graphing calculator technology is why the costs haven't come down far more. Memory, processing, and batteries are all a whole lot more affordable than they used to be but graphing calculator costs remain stubbornly high. The price of a low-end netbook is scarily close to the price of the high-end graphing calculator.
My guess is that all the components slowing down technological alter also inhibit competition, leaving Texas Instruments having a lot extra pricing power than any other gadget maker could hope for. Calculator apps abound for smartphones, but you can't use them in some classes and for some tests. That keeps Texas Instruments master of the calculator industry, with an estimated retail marketplace share of 80 percent, according to NPD. How much could be the industry worth towards the organization? In SEC filings, TI groups the revenue from its machines below "Other" together with projectors and licensing agreements. Inside the last quarter, the business only generated $716 million in income from the segment, but its operating profit was a healthy $236 million. That is a 33 percent margin, better than any other business that TI has.
Possibly the real question to ask about graphing calculator technology is why the costs haven't come down far more. Memory, processing, and batteries are all a whole lot more affordable than they used to be but graphing calculator costs remain stubbornly high. The price of a low-end netbook is scarily close to the price of the high-end graphing calculator.
My guess is that all the components slowing down technological alter also inhibit competition, leaving Texas Instruments having a lot extra pricing power than any other gadget maker could hope for. Calculator apps abound for smartphones, but you can't use them in some classes and for some tests. That keeps Texas Instruments master of the calculator industry, with an estimated retail marketplace share of 80 percent, according to NPD. How much could be the industry worth towards the organization? In SEC filings, TI groups the revenue from its machines below "Other" together with projectors and licensing agreements. Inside the last quarter, the business only generated $716 million in income from the segment, but its operating profit was a healthy $236 million. That is a 33 percent margin, better than any other business that TI has.
