Why do calculator manufactures like to reinvent the wheel?

[HP67]

(03-11-2014 07:48 AM)debrouxl Wrote:  It's just a matter of making their hardware characteristics stink less on the high-end, and brush up / make dirt cheap the low-end as well.

I suppose it's getting harder to tell but HP hardware was always better than mass market junk, which is what RPi and Beagle arguably are.

I hear you on the fact that calculator hardware is no longer state of the art and is expensive compared to other portable devices, but we don't need that kind of power nor the power consumption that comes with it, nor the lousy build quality that comes with it.

That's kind of exactly the point. We don't need a 400 MHz ARM calculator. And anybody who thinks we do need one thinks that way because a 1 GHz single core phone is now old-tech and you wouldn't be caught dead with one. But we're not talking about "phones" that are supposed to be able to play HQ video, and video games, and surf the web.

Good engineering used to be about sane limits and delivering function with correctness, reliability, good materials, and some amount of finesse, as opposed to today's "answer" which seems to be throwing as much hardware and generic software you can at the problem.

Tim Wessman said they needed 5MB for a font on the Prime. That puts devices like the HP 48 in a whole new light, doesn't it?