I can't get over the fact that schools still have students wasting their money on those overpriced and outdated calculators.
A smart student will realize that TI-34 will work for pretty much every level math up to Pre-Calculus. From pre-calculus forward, or when going into statistics, it is pretty much absolutely necessary to at least have a TI-83 (Plus) though. Plus, they may be expensive, but they will work for absolutely ever, and due to them always being needed, they have a decent resell value if you need some cash and no longer need the calculator. It probably doesn't help that Texas Instruments has a bit of a monopoly on the high level calculator market, primarily because every textbook that requires calculator use has a TI calculator as the base. Many times, comparable calculators from other brands are either missing functions that teachers, textbooks, and general formulas will mostly use, or are unnecessarily convoluted in trying to make the calculator seem unique.
So yeah, expensive? I guess. For most people here, you can pick up a used TI-84 for around $80, which, when considering multi-year usage, isn't really so bad. Hell, a person can pick up a TI-83 Plus for about $45 used, and that has gotten me through higher level math courses fine.
Also, outdated? Do you expect some great leaps in the field of general calculations and established formulas hundreds of years old so that we can have newer and even more expensive calculators? If you happen to try to argue that phones and tablets have graphing calculator apps, well, I hope you have enough common sense to realize that all because something can be a calculator doesn't mean a teacher is going to let you use it as one.
