Texas Instruments has been selling the same expensive graphing calculator to schools for decades, and nobody seems to have noticed.
The company’s calculator division has dominated classrooms since the early 2000s, according to a new podcast episode from The Verge. The episode, part of the fifth season of the show’s “Version History” series, tells the story of how one company took over the market and never let it go. The show also suggests the dominance goes back even farther than that.
The Verge’s Story
The episode features The Verge’s Nilay Patel and Victoria Song, who recount their memories of the iconic and expensive calculators. The show’s host, David Pierce, joins them to walk through the history of TI graphing calculators.
This is the second episode of the fifth season of Version History. The show has already covered the perilous journeys of The Oregon Trail that many students experienced in the computer lab. Over the next few weeks, the series will turn to other back-to-school tech, including:
- The One Laptop Per Child
- The Chromebook
- The LeapPad
- The overhead projector
Subscribers can get access to all episodes of Version History without ads through their account settings.
The Calculator That Refuses to Die
The TI-84 Plus has been the calculator most students are required to buy, year after year. It is outdated by any reasonable measure. It is also the calculator that most students are required to buy.
The Washington Post has reported on the situation. Its headline sums it up: “The unstoppable TI-84 Plus: How an outdated calculator still holds a monopoly on classrooms.” The New York Times has also covered the story, with a piece titled “State adding a tool for 8th grade math.”
ProMarket, a project of the International Center for Law and Economics, has also weighed in. Its article, “TI’s Calculator Monopoly Offers Lessons for Educators in the Age of Generative AI,” addresses the broader stakes for teachers who are now dealing with AI tools in the classroom.
Related Coverage
The Verge has also covered other tech stories that share a theme of companies holding on to their grip. A recent post, titled “It’s not just LG. Every TV company is spying on you,” looked at how TV makers track their customers. Another post, “Gemini went rogue, hacked three companies, and Google hid it,” covered a hacking incident linked to Gemini.
Other recent coverage includes “OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web” and “The 2.5-hour AI-generated Odyssey movie is 2.5 hours too long.” The site has also posted “Meta’s Muse is creepy, but maybe not for the reasons you think.”
Schedule of the Season
The podcast is running its fifth season with a back-to-school focus. The episodes are dropping in sequence, with the next few weeks covering a range of educational technology.
| Episode | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1 | The Oregon Trail |
| 2 | TI graphing calculators |
| 3 | One Laptop Per Child |
| 4 | Chromebook |
| 5 | LeapPad |
| 6 | Overhead projector |
What the Coverage Shows
The coverage from The Verge, the Washington Post, and ProMarket all point to the same core issue: a market where one company’s product is treated as the standard, year after year. The Washington Post’s reporting on the TI-84 Plus covers the monopoly question directly. The New York Times piece takes a narrower focus on math education. ProMarket’s piece connects the calculator story to broader questions about technology in the classroom.
The Verge’s podcast brings the three together into a single narrative. The show explains how the market worked this way and how it has held.
The Verge’s Take on TI
The Verge’s podcast is not making a policy argument. It is not calling for a change in procurement rules. It is simply explaining how one company managed to take over the market and never let it go.
Patel and Song share their own memories of the calculators they used in school. Pierce ties those memories to the broader history of Texas Instruments’ calculator business. The result is a story that anyone who has ever bought a TI calculator for a class can relate to.
The episode tells the story of how the monopoly came to be and how it has held. The question of whether anyone can break it is the one that remains open.
Source material: “The hidden monopoly behind your TI graphing calculator,” The Verge.
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