The death of calculator market?

[Allen]

Love this post and the discussion. I've been studying this problem for some time now. Not being in the business of manufacturing calculators, I don't have production and sales data, but as collector and relatively a high-volume trader, I do have strike price history I can use as a (perhaps poor?) proxy for calculator demand.

During the COVID shutdown, I reviewed my price database of HP calculator prices to see if are calculators a good long-term investment (e.g. for collection purposes?)

I chose 6 common models ( 2 graphing, 2 scientific, 2 financial) that I had data for almost every year from 2007-2020 (some years more than others- and no data was available for a some years).

Graphing Calculators:
48g/gx-nominal price does about as well as inflation



Scientific Calculators
32sii and 42s - price is relatively flat (does not keep up with inflation)



Financial Calculators
17bii 12c- nominally price is falling, well below inflation


(USD, 2007 Dollars, inflation source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflati...7&amount=1 )

Despite the sad news that our collections likely won't turn into gold, I still enjoy collecting and using these calculators and the idea that they are headed to devalued obsolescence makes me a little sad.

I do think other commentators are correct that emulators and smart phone apps have taken over some of the demand, but it's not universally true for every model.

For some models, like the 48gx, the resell demand has been partially driven by commercial applications like surveying. As the supply of new HP48gx's has dried up, the demand for commercial developers like TDS has also waned, and users have adapted to more "modern" approaches.

For financial calculators, I suspect there is a large portion of the market that has been taken over by Excel (tm), smart phone apps, custom financial products (e.g. a realtor now uses their internal mortgage tracking system over a 12c on the desk) or even website "calculators" for specific things- For example this BMI calculator.

For mortgage calculations I still prefer my 17bii, but with excel or python I can run 100's of millions of monte-carlo simulations before a major financial decision. Even for non-financial calculations,

In both cases the substitution effect has led consumers away from hand-held calculators to other things.

I foresee a not-too-distant future where both cell phone calculator apps and even some of what we do today in Excel are replaced by automated voice assistants.

I can already ask Amazon Alexa and Google Home basic maths questions like: "What is the 84th digit of pi?" and "What is 8 factorial?" or "What is the square root of 123456789?" Creating the technology to convert my question into a computer-understandable symbols is WAY more difficult than actually solving any of these fairly trivial math questions.

I tried asking Alexa: "What is the integral from 0 to 2 pi of sin of x dx" but that one didn't go very well right now.. Maybe the future will fix that?