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[Michael de Estrada]

(12-04-2017 06:28 AM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  

(12-04-2017 04:37 AM)zeno333 Wrote:  There was a day when HP did whatever it took to fix a calculator bug...Anything...Those days are gone now.

To put this in perspective: when HP released their first handheld calculator, the HP-35, in 1972, they charged $395 for it. In 2017 dollars, that's roughly $2300. How much did you spend on your latest brand-new calculator?

That is a false equivalency. All electronics were far more expensive back then. My first color TV that I bought in 1972 would cost over $10K in today’s inflated dollars. The same could be said of my first Tandy microcomputer. When I bought my HP 35 in 1973, the price had just dropped to $295, but that still represented two weeks of my take home pay. As production costs came down, so did the prices of HP calculators, yet HP still managed to maintain high quality standards until the company lost its way in the new millenium. Meanwhile, companies like Apple still manage to maintain high quality standards, while remaining competitive.