The actuel Prime future...

[Kevin Ouellet]

(08-26-2014 01:57 PM)cutterjohn Wrote:  

(08-25-2014 05:21 AM)Kevin Ouellet Wrote:  It has to do with offer and demand. Same reason why NBA Elite 11 for the Playstation 3 costs $800 on Ebay and why the NTSC version of FIFA 14 for the Playstation 2 will most likely do the same in a decade. That said, maybe offer and demand is what drives Canadian HP calc prices this high? (but again, by that logic, a TI link cable would cost over $70,000 in brick and mortar stores)

As for the $90 HP 50g price tag I saw it on Amazon last year, not in a brick and mortar store. Same for the $208 price tag in Canada (it was on Best Buy website). The American Best Buy site charged $137 for it back then.

To add what I find to be a hilarious(to me at least aside), I happened to be trawling ebay(US only) yesterday and literally found TONs of TI nSpires, nSpire Touchpads, and both with CAS for SIGNIFICANTLY less than even TI 83/4+?! (nspires started at c. $40 while 83/4s where c. $75...)

Some of those 83/4s had screen that had been to hell and back(looked like burn marks, stuck pixels but always with a caveat: you can still make out the numbers... ROFLMAO! meanwhile the nSpires looked in pretty decent shape. (Many were apparently former school property as they had the yellow plastic covers, etc.)

So I also bought an older nspire for $50(had 84+ keypad and cables, so worth the $10 over the $40 one was a touchpad as well... I just like that keyboard better, and sent an offer to one of the 84+s with a decent screen for quite a bit less, awaiting the acceptance/decline ATM. I just want to see recent TIs and what they did to their old ones as I have an 85 kicking around that was given to me. Never got around to buying/making a data cable for it. Why bother? I had a 49g...

Back to our topic:
Pretty much no truly high end calcs are available in the stores near me, Target, Wallymart, Sears, WorstBuy, etc. Didn't check at ucenter as I didn't think that they'd carry calcs, and haven't been to a uni book store in a long time. (Went last time specifically to buy my 49g, but since then it's just less frustrating(and cheaper) to buy online... (OK I did check for 50gs at WorstBuy/et. al. but at the time they had ZERO HP calcs on shelves, just TI 8Xs and nspires and casios and maybe some cheap sharps... I think that one of the office supply b&ms had ti-89 Ti though, also ridiculously priced...)

That is nothing. At Staples in Quebec City area, during the spring of 2008, you could get a TI-Nspire Clickpad with the 84+SE keypad included for $159.99, yet the actual TI-84+SE calculator costed $176.86. The next year, the Nspire increased to $169.99, but just the fact you could get a TI-Nspire with 84+SE emulation for cheaper than the 84+SE hardware itself for two years straight was definitively one sign that at one point or another, in certain areas of the world, the Nspire was a commercial failure.

Even in the last two years Staples discounts the Nspire CX to $149.99 during Spring and early Summer, which is even cheaper than their TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition ($159.99)