HP Prime too complicated

[JSBach]

(07-11-2018 09:53 PM)Jean-Baptiste Boric Wrote:  

(07-11-2018 01:39 PM)JSBach Wrote:  IMO the HP Prime is a mighty but much too complicated tool.

It is marketed as a pupil's (or student's) device, who are to learn mathematics or physics.
But in the time they need to learn how to use such a calculator including CAS, graphics, programming, they better learn mathematics itself.

My daughter (13 years old, she likes mathematics) didn't even look at her calculator's manual, she simply isn't interested.

Personally I'm glad her school recommends the Casio fx-991, a non-CAS, non-graphics & non-programming calculator that cost us less then 20 €, and is IMHO more powerful and complicated than is needed.

You are comparing a €20 calculator for middle school against a >€120 top-of-the-line calculator for university/engineering workloads and complaining that the latter is way overkill for your 13 years old daughter whereas the former does the job just as well. That's like comparing a SS-520 rocket with a Space Shuttle and complaining that the latter takes $1,500,000,000 to deliver a 1kg payload to orbit while the former only takes $500,000 and does the job just as well.

Yes. The Space Shuttle was way too expensive. That's the reason they stopped it.

And that is the point:
The Prime and its many features are overkill (and they make the use and the development more complex, e.g. the differences between Home mode and CAS mode).

At school and at university it is enough to get a good engineering calculator and additionally get software for CAS, statistics, programming languages like Python, Java, ...

JSBach

PS: I knew some engineers who stopped buying HP calculators after the HP-41CX and the HP-42S, because their programs didn't run on HP-48,... let alone the Prime. They only wanted to run their (self-written) programs and for other calculations HP41 & HP-42 was enough.