Bear with me if you’ve already seen this comment, but I dug out my old TI-89 a while ago for some reason, and all I had to do was plug in four AAA batteries and it worked.
If it had been fitted with a rechargeable battery, 30 years ago, even assuming it was still functional, I would have needed to recharge it... but with what?
Now we have USB-C rechargeable AA/AAA batteries, so there’s really no excuse.
Non-user-replaceable batteries are terrible. It turns devices into e-waste. I wish device manufacturers would understand that. I wish consumers would understand that.
Device manufacturers want you to buy another one. They understand. Consumers, not so much.
I agree with you, also for things like radios alkalines are great as a battery that stays outside of the radio and is used when you need it, and doesn't leak much charge at all.
But e-waste is still a problem.
No need to think about charging the controller - just have a pair of charged AAs nearby and switch them out when it becomes necessary.
The reason it would be a problem is because USB didn't have a suitable port in 1998.
Upgrade to 89 Titanium and it already has a USB (mini) port built in. Mini is not ideal but it's fine. You can get a whole pile of mini and micro adapters for a couple dollars.
The fact that batteries wear out is a significant issue for longevity. Backwards compatibility is a solved problem if you use USB.
No RPN. Every modern graphing calculator needs a mode (doesn't have to be the default) with RPN and a visible (4+ entry) stack. Once people actually learn how to use that for rapid, efficient calculations, they won't go back, but they never learn because all the major calculators don't even offer it as an alternate mode. That's the killer app for "graphing" calculators, because they can show multiple stack entries.
RPN may not be useful for math classes, which tend not to have as many problems involving many sequential calculations, but it's extremely valuable for science and engineering.
Which I found amusing, because the list of approved calulators included several graphing calculator models with computer algebra systems in ROM sufficient to produce correct answers to every problem on the exam, and they're worried about what I might have stored in the memory of a (then) 15-year old keystroke programmable calculator with a single line, ten digit, seven segment numeric display.
If this had RPN, I’d likely purchase one. Without, it’s a pass.
HP were cool, yet Casio FX tablets with plain BASIC dominated engineering in Portugal, FX-850P were the models we were after.
I mostly remember playing games on my TI-84 in high school. We used it in class maybe once or twice. None of my college classes allowed graphing calculators on tests, so ironically I had to buy a "dumb" calculator even though I owned the fancy one.
There are other features that can be useful - scientific notation, symbolic solver, unit conversions, etc - but graphing as such always seemed like a gimmick.
I think it's more of a not-entirely-rational appeal to parents: "if my kid has a top-notch calculator for high school / college, maybe they're gonna be better at math". And kids did not object, but in the end, mostly just sideloaded games and horsed around.
Well, I wrote a couple of programs that were useful for quite a while. They involved electromagnetism and changing frames of reference. I definitely was able to do quite a lot of Physics with my Ti-89.
Now apparently MicroPython has replaced BASIC in most calculators, the issue is that apparently always lags a bit behind, this one appears to still use Python 2.7.
But from both the teardown and from another review [1] there are some concerns about the bugs and lack of features in Zero's BASIC and MicroPython. The firmware is updatable, so hopefully Zero irons things out, but still not a good look to have this present in a release.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRf_cVGDhYs
[1] https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20941&start=0
Seems only superficially cheaper than the TI-84 ($89 vs $112)
Does it have a CAS?
I see this as a nice feature but not a must-have. Not sure if the industry agrees, or if the industry just doesn't know how many people would spring for backlit keypads because none have existed so far.
