These calculators are, without question, excellent little devices and the HP ones in particular had great engineering behind them. I had an HP48 in undergrad, which was considered pretty much mandatory for engineering. There was a thriving student sneakernet of programs you could get that would trivialize certain problems. Some friends had the HP49G which was, in my opinion, a step down in terms of build quality. Years later I bought an HP50 which was the best of both worlds.
I still have my HP50 but there's just no reason to use it. Anywhere I go I either have my phone or a computer. When I was in the air force I would have to go into EMSEC zones where you couldn't bring external devices, such as SCIFs, but the number of people with needs to be running engineering calculations in such an environment rounds down to 0. Certainly I wasn't one of them.
Even "in the field" nowadays, you're likely to have satellite connectivity and a laptop. There's just not really a use case for graphing calculators that I can think of. It's too bad, because they're awesome.
Someone was able to use ChatGPT on a graphing calculator.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bicjxl4EcJg
These calculators are, without question, excellent little devices and the HP ones in particular had great engineering behind them. I had an HP48 in undergrad, which was considered pretty much mandatory for engineering. There was a thriving student sneakernet of programs you could get that would trivialize certain problems. Some friends had the HP49G which was, in my opinion, a step down in terms of build quality. Years later I bought an HP50 which was the best of both worlds.
I still have my HP50 but there's just no reason to use it. Anywhere I go I either have my phone or a computer. When I was in the air force I would have to go into EMSEC zones where you couldn't bring external devices, such as SCIFs, but the number of people with needs to be running engineering calculations in such an environment rounds down to 0. Certainly I wasn't one of them.
Even "in the field" nowadays, you're likely to have satellite connectivity and a laptop. There's just not really a use case for graphing calculators that I can think of. It's too bad, because they're awesome.