The death of calculator market?

[John Keith]

I mostly agree with what Jim and Thomas said above, but with a bit more optimism. HP is a very large company while the market for calculators is relatively small. HP is also no longer the engineering-focused company it once was. It is thus not surprising that corporate management cares little for calculators.

On the bright side, there is much activity in both hardware (Swiss Micros, replacement boards for Classics) and software (NewRPL, new HP-41 ROMs, emulators). A small market is IMHO better served by small agile companies that can respond to the wishes of users, and the open source and DIY movements add even more ferment to the mix. I would like to see someone making calculators with the ruggedness and build quality of older HP's but I think few would be willing to pay what they would cost to produce.

I am a relative late-comer to HP calculators (my first HP was a 15C) so I don't personally have much nostalgia for the Classics though I do appreciate them. I certainly prefer real calculators with physical keys but Free42 (with keyboard clicks) and EMU48 (with haptic feedback) are pretty close, and a lot faster than the real calcs. I also use EMU48 on the PC quite often for the ease of loading and saving programs and transferring them to my HP 50g.

Realistically we are looking at a post-HP world, but that may not be such a bad thing after all.