SAT and AP tests now offer free digital graphing options for students, but it's harder than it seems for school districts to look beyond Texas Instruments

The TI-84 Evo features a different interface than what past math students had come to know.

As high-school math students gear up to buy the newest version of Texas Instruments' TI-84 graphic calculator, cheaper upstarts are trying to break the company's decades-old grip on the market.

Texas Instruments $(TXN)$ first launched the TI-84 in 2004. Now the company is out with a new version, the Evo, which debuted in April with faster processing speeds and a home screen that features icons for different tools.

Graphing calculators are no longer the novelty they were roughly half a century ago, and the cost of components like LCD screens and processors has fallen since then. Still, Texas Instruments has been able to command premium prices for its calculators, largely because many high-schoolers have no choice but to buy them. The Evo has a $159.99 list price, though Target is currently selling it for $85.99 and other retailers are offering deals as well.

Some say customers aren't exactly paying for innovation, but rather for decades of familiarity on the educator side - along with textbooks that build the calculators into their curricula.

"Students and parents don't choose calculators," University of Arizona law and business professor Barak Orbach told MarketWatch. "It's the school that dictates for them."

Deep roots

As 39 states move to restrict cellphones in classrooms, the Evo is doubling down on what made the TI-84 a staple in classrooms, functioning as a distraction-free device that fulfills academic math needs.

The company owes its success in part to a smart strategic choice that has helped it take over the U.S. classroom. In the 1980s, while Sharp, HP and Casio marketed their scientific calculators to professionals, Texas Instruments was focused on penetrating the education space. In 2022, TI reported that it had sold more than 90 million graphing calculators since 1990.

Texas Instruments teamed up with math educators and textbook publishers to create an ecosystem for teacher training programs and instruction materials that would seamlessly standardize TI across American classrooms.

Following the release of the TI-84 in 2004, Texas Instruments cemented itself in the classroom, with TI-specific lessons included in major math textbooks and entire districts adopting the model, according to analysis by Orbach and his son Eli, a current student at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Texas Instruments didn't respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.

Competition is brewing

There have been recent attempts to offer students cheaper alternatives to the TI-84. The College Board, for instance, fully integrated the free digital-graphing tool Desmos directly into its digital SAT in 2024, and followed up by doing so with calculator-based AP exams this spring.

It's not necessarily easy for entire school districts to shift to a new standard, given that teachers have been instructing using these calculators for years. That hasn't stopped individual schools from trying to break away.

Abid Choudhury, assistant principal of STEM at Townsend Harris High School in Queens, New York, called Desmos "the gold standard" for usability. But the New York Regents exams still expect students to have physical calculators, which has limited the ability for schools to go fully digital.

Free tools like Desmos solve accessibility issues for Townsend Harris, where it's "just not a reality" for every student to buy a TI-84 calculator. The school opted for a middle ground, purchasing 200 graphing calculators from French company NumWorks for its ninth-grade classes, with plans to create a schoolwide rollout over three years.

Choudhury described NumWorks as a more affordable and intuitive device that provides a free online version that students can access at any time, even when they aren't holding the physical calculator. While there was initial pushback to the idea, considering that teachers had used the TI ecosystem for more than 15 years, "we really have to think about what's best for the students," he said.

Texas Instruments' Evo has moved to a menu-based interface that resembles that of Casio and NumWorks, according to Choudhury. Having a simplified menu of tools and functionality helped encourage Townsend Harris to switch to NumWorks. The Evo, he said, "comes at a much higher price point, which becomes challenging for families and students."

The future of the industry

With education institutions integrating Desmos directly into tests, TI may be seeing the first real threat to its classroom dominance in decades, according to Eli Orbach. "It's not going to be the end of the world for TI, but it certainly is significant," he said.

The company's relationships with teachers and textbook publishers are a key advantage, he added. But as individual schools like Townsend Harris expand access to tools beyond the Texas Instruments ecosystem, they're showing that the switching costs may not be as high as they appear.

"The learning curve isn't that steep," Choudhury said. He thinks students quickly find alternative calculator options to be more intuitive than the TI-84s.

-Julian Torres