Smartphone killed the calculator star. Some thoughts... and data too

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(02-09-2016 12:13 PM)Luigi Vampa Wrote:  Scientific calculators' market has shrunk so much, specially for RPN calcs, that the latter seems no longer juicy enough for a big player like HP.
As per the comments in this forum (I am based in Euroland) it seems to me TI has done a very good lobby job in the US. From Japan, Casio keeps marketing their algebraic thinny machines worldwide.
The 50g is gone, the plain-old 35s seems faulty and basic, and students' Prime seems RPN challenged. There isn't a commercial true RPN scientific calc being massively marketed now, is there?... as the song says, 'those days are gone' :.! Sorry, it is rainy, windy and cloudy in Madrid today :O)
At least the RPN spirit seems handed over a swift and small company, like SM, who provides the love and care no big corporation can.

I am so sick and tired of HP. They always want to sell their business calculators and offer very mediocre scientific ones. Their sales are probably pretty awful actually and here is why.

In the eighties I could walk into a decent bookstore or office store and choose between many HP models. Well built calculators that the HP company stood behind.

Since then, they produce only a few and less appealing models. What is worse, they cannot be found anywhere. I cannot walk into a store in Sweden and find an HP calculator. 5 years ago I was in the process of getting a netbook in Taiwan, so I visited a lot of tech shops. I always looked for calculators as well. I found zero, zip, none, absolutely no HP calculator anywhere in Taiwan. I could easily get Casio and sometimes TI, but never any HP model. Totally impossible!
Today, I look around a bit in Canada and US and I still cannot find any HP calculator in shops, they are less common than UFOs.

So, it should come as no surprise to anyone (except perhaps HP) that HP RPN calculators does not sell. They are simply not anywhere to be found, not even the business models.

Here is what HP should do. Stop listening to bean counters. Make calculators that you stand behind. Yes, that means fixing bugs in them and keeping them on the market.
Just take your HP12C moulds and bring back the HP15C, perhaps the 11C and the 16C as well. Then bring back the HP41 as well. You apparently cannot make a new decent calculator, so why not just bring back some old ones instead? All those models are good (even though I am not so thrilled by the programming model on the voyagers).