It&#x27;s not like TI is selling exactly the same TI-83 now, and it seems that most of their R&amp;D effort and value comes from software.<p>You can easily duplicate the hardware these days, or even do everything in software but it seems that high quality CAS software is pretty hard to make.<p>TI and Mathlab pretty much got a monopoly on that as it seems I haven&#x27;t seen a single off-brand graphical calculator that actually worked.<p>Not even sure if anyone besides TI and to lesser extent HP are even making graphical calculators these days (HP ones are (or at least were) substantially more expensive.<p>So when you have a market monopoly and a product with very little obsolescence (graphical calculators can easily last 10-15 years these days) there&#x27;s nothing to drive the market down.<p>The TI-8X series is also one of the few &quot;certified&quot; ones and they also have localized versions that disable certain features for countries that limit the use of &quot;smart calculators&quot; but don&#x27;t ban them outright.