Agreed on all points. Mine broke, and I’m forced to use my 48-S, which I hate.
I hate that this is a dead technology. I mean SLIDERULES (I’ve got one areound here I got from my dad) are a dead technology…but dammit this is different…It’s just not right that 15 years from now, my kids will look at my 48 and scoff that it can’t connect to iTunes (or it’s relevant successor) and can’t surf the web.
TI-89. I absolutely LOVE the screen. It’s far easier to read than any other calculator tha I’ve ever used. I love being able to see what i typed in in “pretty print” so I can see if I put the equation in wrong.
It also handles Calc and DE really well. I absolutely love this calculator and it held my hand thru 4 years of a BSEE.
I never could get the hang of those RPN calculators though.
If I can’t do it by hand, it goes off to Maple.
I have a crappy TI calculator (very old school–not a graphing calculator) that I found on the floor of a lecture hall in college. Great for most of my purposes.
I general, though, my favorite is … Apple’s Graphing Calculator application from OS 9. I never used it to draw any graphs (I’m not in high school anymore, and not in the sciences) but it was a demon when it come to writing out long algebraic equations, and had handy built-in functions to “simplify” or to “solve for” a chosen variable. Awesome.
But then they ditched it in OS X, and went back to a crappy one-line-display calculator. SOBs.
Do you have classic support installed on your mac? I think it still has that app there. (Doublechecks) Yup. Still there!
The HP 32S. I like RPN, and the 32S has enough features for my needs. For anything more complex, I’ve always found it easier to use a PC software such as MathCAD.
Yeah, I know … I just hate waiting for Classic to boot up (even if it’s just the once per session).
I have only heard of RPN through the SDMB. For me, it has always been TI for school purposes. Currently, I am using an $80 TI-89, and so far the value has far exceeded the price.
I mostly do everything by hand, though.
TI-89 Titanium…but I am not a calculator geek like some of you seem to be…I don’t even know what most of you are talking about! I am learning to use my 89 in Trig. (College) When I was in high school 22 years ago we didn’t have calculators like this, so it is all new to me. I also have a Casio scientific calculator I used for my remedial math and college algebra.
Any time I discover how to do something new with my 89 it is a big thrill for me - it is capable of so much! The downfall is that I depend on it to do things like factoring for me, and I should probably do those the old fashioned way so I don’t forget how to do it.
The TI-89 Titanium, for all the reasons mentioned above, including the one about how TIs are what the schools use. However, there are some drawbacks:
[ul][li]Can never decide whether to use “exact” mode, “approximate” mode or “automatic.” I always have either extra decimal points that are distracting, or I find myself having to [diamond]-[enter] nearly everything.[/li][li]No [sup]2[/sup] button like my trusty 83 had![/li][li]No root function like the 83 had under “math,” so to take a cube root, you have to type “^ ( 1 / 3 )” instead of “3 math 4” (IIRC)[/li][li]You must close all parentheses! On the 83, you could type “7(3+4” and it would simply assume that you meant 7(3+4). Now, you have to close all your parentheses.[/li][li]Variables are a little weird. For example, xy doesn’t mean x times y, but a new (usually undefined) variable called simply “xy.”[/li][li]Many things now take a bit longer to get to. “Y=”, “graph”, and all three basic trig functions among them.[/ul][/li]
Don’t get me wrong. This is all vastly outweighed by the differentiation, integration, solve, factor, and several other features. Especially pretty print.
On the exact opposite end of the computational spectrum, I must mention the Curta which does very little but does it well and attracts the attention of classmates even more than the 89.
I never use the 83 so I can’t compare it to how the 83 does things. I agree that I also use [diamond][enter] most often. I had fits with the cube root thing - the manual isn’t the easiest to read, and if you are like me and aren’t a math whiz, reading it is like reading a book in Greek. There are still quite a few things I don’t know how to do with my calc and if I knew math better I could explain it better…like how to do log base 2 and anti (or is it inverse?) log.
Kow Kow 
I posted that link already. Do you have a Curta? I haven’t even seen one, and they’re rather pricey on eBay.
I use a TI-83+. I haven’t run up against its limitations yet, but I’m looking at a TI-89 Titanium or the HP-48GX Derleth mentioned.
Mac OS X 10.4 includes Grapher, in /Applications/Utilities. It’s a pretty good app.
I love my TI-89. It’s so cool that I’ve only to use it for another year and a half, because after I finish pchem , I don’t think I’ll ever need it again.
I’ve been using a TI-86 for about seven years now. To me, it was a good balance between more power than I needed at the time and I think it had a better user interface than either the 83 or the 89. Plus, I use the built-in and editable constants all the time and the conversion function comes in handy for at least some conversions. Yeah, I know the 89 has got those somewhere but I’ve never been able to figure out that menu system and I don’t need to do the 3D graphing or anything like that now. Really, it’s almost overkill for the kind of calculations I have to do now, but the large screen and memory is so much nicer than dealing with a scientific calculator.
I’m not sure what you mean by antilog, but for your other question:
I came across this problem with my 83 last year, and haven’t run into it yet this year. I solved it using a formula you probably either learned or will learn in second-year algebra, usually called the “Change of Base” formula. Basically, it says that log[sub]b[/sub]a = (log[sub]c[/sub]a)/(log[sub]c[/sub]b), for all values of c>1. So you write a program (or better yet, a function) that takes b and a as inputs and calculates (ln a)/(ln b). If you want more detailed directions, you can probably google for them or just email me.
dancinguy(@)linkline(.)com
Antilog is raising a value to a power: The base-10 antilog of x is 10[sup]x[/sup], for example.
It is the inverse of a logarithm because the base-10 logarithm of x is the value y such that 10[sup]y[/sup]=x.
I have used TIs and Casios in the past, in specific the TI-83+ and the Casio CFX-9850GB+. Both were much more similar to each other than the HP I own, which was great for me but could be a problem for someone trying out an HP with no prior RPN experience.
But for me, the biggest advantage of the HP is that it has a unified interface in the form of the stack. I wouldn’t be nearly as fast if I was forced to keep going back to the menu to find functions, as I was with the Casio I owned. I also wouldn’t be anywhere near as competent: I have delved pretty deeply into the HP’s programming and mathematical libraries in large part because it’s so easy to screw around. There is no barrier limiting what you can do with the largely unstructured stack, as opposed to being forced into menu-driven wizards to do things like statistics and graphing.
The HP has all of the wizards you could want, including a very nice one that allows you to interactively build a pretty-printed equation—push the normal mathematical buttons and the calculator keeps everything looking nice—and one that lets you build matricies in something that looks like a spreadsheet. But everything you can do in a wizard can be done on the stack, and therefore can be included into a program.