Since then, the cost of electronic components has dramatically decreased, along with TI’s R&D costs - yet the TI-84 Plus still sells for nearly the same price. Its bestseller, the TI-84 Plus, was first released in 2004 for around $120. TI now enjoys an estimated 80% market share of the international graphing calculator market. This ubiquity led The New York Times to dub it the “greatest technological advancement in math classrooms in a generation.”īut why, 20 years and many tech leaps later, are students still forced to buy these calculators? And why are they still prohibitively expensive? Monopolies set their own prices “They made it so that that the types of things you were allowed to bring into a test were essentially limited to their devices.”Īt the same time, TI set up a robust teacher training program, launched a help hotline (1-800-TI-CARES), and organized conferences with hands-on demonstrations.īy 2000, TI had sold 20m graphing calculators at $100+ a pop - enough for 40% of America’s high-school students. “A lot of graphing calculator success was due to really aggressive lobbying for certain policies,” a source in the education space told The Hustle. In one instance, it even lobbied the Texas legislature to make it mandatory for all students to take Algebra II - a course that often requires the use of a TI graphing calculator.
The company campaigned against devices with touchscreens, internet connection, and QWERTY keyboards. And every time a competing tech innovation came along, it lobbied to maintain its perch atop the parabola.Īccording to Open Secrets and ProPublica data, Texas Instruments paid lobbyists to hound the Department of Education every year from 2005 to 2009 - right around the time when mobile technology and apps were becoming more of a threat. It sought approval for standardized test use from administrators like the College Board. The company established partnerships with big textbook companies that integrated TI-specific exercises (complete with screenshots of buttons) into classroom curricula. So, over a 20-year period, TI set out to manufacture demand by making its calculators mandated classroom tools. An early TI-81 in use (YouTube/ David Hays) Educators were rightfully wary of change - especially change that wasn’t yet proven to improve student performance. TI, a semiconductor giant, sensed “an opportunity to provide some inexpensive technology that students could use every day.” But there was a problem: At the time, most students were perfectly fine with drawing graphs on paper and using simpler handheld calculators. Though Casio (1985) and Sharp (1986) were the first to market, it wasn’t until 1990, when Texas Instruments released the TI-81, that graphing calculators really began to hit the mainstream. In the late 1980s, electronics companies began to see a space in the education market for a calculator that could graph equations. But it appears that the rise of new, free-to-use technology is starting to chip away at this empire. Yet, for millions of middle school and high school students around America, the graphing calculator is still a required standard - and TI controls an estimated 80% of the $300m+ market.Īn obsolete piece of technology has managed to maintain a stranglehold on an increasingly tech-savvy education market. While the cost of its components has dramatically decreased, its price ($150 MSRP) has not. With 24 kilobytes of RAM, a 96×64 pixel screen, and a power system that still relies on 4 AAA batteries, it has been usurped by hundreds of modern handheld devices. Since its debut in 2004, its specs and components have remained virtually unchanged. Texas Instrument’s best-selling graphing calculator, the TI-84, is a woefully outdated piece of technology.
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