My parents got me a TI-89 in the 8th grade. I'm in my 4th year of College (Engineering) and let me tell you, I love my TI-89. Its natural to pick it up and have it integrate or differentiate a complex equation, a feature that is missing in the TI-83. don't get me wrong, it can be easy to let your calc cripple you mathematically, but when used as a tool, the right one can be your best friend.

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Yep. We've got to use the CAS version

I began at a four-year college in the fall of 1969, and took a slide rule class. I still have the slide rule. One day, I discovered a little room in one of the buildings which contained a table, chairs, and several Wang terminals. The click buttons and the nixie tubes were a revelation, also the digital nature of it. I suppose I could say it was my first exposure to digital technology.

In time, I became a collector of vintage calculators, and the flagship of my collection is a twelve-nixie Monroe desk unit. My daily driver is a Sharp EL-515.

my edc (every day calc) is a Sharp EL-556D which i've used over one and a half decade all through my school and study time and i still love it because of its flatness, it's very handy.
for small stuff like solving some iterations a ti-89 is my backup but it's nearly unused, the rest is up to pc and fem progs.

HP-15C

Seems like the nSpire is quite complexe...
If that is the case, I'll just stick with my 84+ now.

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It's not bad, I demoed it last week... you can get an 84+ faceplate to use on it lol.

A friend and I once modded an 83 with a capacitor mod to 4x the clock speed. Though unstable for everyday use, it would beat out my 49G and 89 or 92 at graphing. My friend eventually put a switch on the 83 to switch between overclocking and the stock speed.

nspire.
Ahhh...
If I need the 84+, I'll just stick with mine right now.
The thing is, you cannot transfer 84+ progs and apps into the nspire. Now thatM's bugging.
I quite like the drag and drop thing.

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Only on the blue one though- the CAS doesn't have a removable faceplate.

Just thought I'd also mention that some Nspire "CAS+" units show up on ebay sometimes. These are prototypes with half the RAM and non-upgradeable firmware.

I used a simple Sharp calculator all through my college Physics degree. It was basically a 4-function with trig functions thrown in and a 1-line display. I rarely needed even that during physics or math classes. I never had a fancy calculator and hated them. All the people I studied with in calculus class clung to them like their magical box and stared at the screen and punched buttons. I'd be like "what are you doing? Look, see? math, on the paper here...."

When I got to grad school switching to Materials Science I realized that the teachers here (All korean FWIW) wrote tests in such a way that it tested your calculator-fu nearly as much as your knowledge. There was literally no way to finish the tests without an advanced calculator having a spreadsheet and ability to integrate and differentiate large functions, quickly and with changeable variables. It was expected that you had the gear to handle it. A bunch of BS, if you ask me, but that's that. I quckly dug out a Ti-89 that I had traded some paintball gear for in college and learned to use it.

Basically, Ti-89 is the only one to consider. Everything else like the Ti-83 is just weak enough to be irritating, yet not simple enough like my old Sharp.

Don't even get me started on HP calculators. Good for nothing but a boat anchor. Clearly they were designed as slide-rule replacements, and I can see where their following comes from. Their reverse-polish notation is indeed more efficient for simple calculation. But that's not what we use calculators for; it's a different world now. It's not about how fast you can calculate the numerical value of a complex term. Now we store entire thermodynamic equations into a single variable, store the constants of the equation in other variables, and differentiate, integrate, and solve for the answer in seconds, in the right units, while printing it up in human-readable form for error checking and comparing and aiding our analysis on the paper. We write macros and programs to do things like compute a crystal lattice constant by simply plugging in the parameters, doing all the vector maths in the background. The Ti-89 is a very efficient and beautiful tool. To me, fancy calculators are still dumb because everything you can do with a calculator can be done with Matlab or a spreadsheet or Mathematica or whatever. But you can't take those things with you to a test, or to the field. I am definitely a Ti-89 fan.

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ti89 is amazing. one of my best tools

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Oh

Hrm...

The Ti-89 Titanium is too advanced for me, simply overly powerful.

I have a ti-89 titanium that I love dearly, but hardly use these days. I might sell it off simply because I don't seem to have the need for all those fancy functions anymore.

I also have an original ti-83 (before the plus) that some kid in high school sold me for $5 and a slice of pizza. I asked him to borrow his calculator because I'd forgot mine, and that was his offer. I didn't think to ask where it came from.... and there's a ti-85 floating around here somewhere, too. That one's fun.