<p>Hello everyone!</p>
<p>I'm planning on buying my very first graphing calculator :D I'm taking Pre-Calc this year and possibly Calculus BC next year and these classes require one. Good graphing calculators are extremely expensive ($100+) so I'm treating this as if I'm buying a new laptop.</p>
<p>My teacher recommends the Texas Instruments® TI-84 Plus Graphing Calculator
Texas</a> Instruments® TI-84 Plus Graphing Calculator | Staples®</p>
<p>What do you guys think?</p>
<p>There’s two reasons to buy an 84 over a cheaper 83:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You’re going to take stats at some point - The 84 does a few calculations with statistics that the 83 doesn’t. These functions don’t matter at all for precalculus or calculus</p></li>
<li><p>You’re going to play games on it - The 84 has a LOT more RAM to store programs. Math programs like the quadratic formula or whatever take up a negligible amount of memory, but games take much more space. I bought my TI-84 in 2007 when this was a much more valuable feature. It’s 2013 and if you own a phone this is probably a non-factor.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Besides that, they’re exactly the same. The 84 graphs more quickly and it handles vertical asymptotes better, but the 83 does everything the 84 does for precalculus or calculus.</p>
<p>If you do go into calculus, a more advanced calculator (like the n-spire CAS) can do calculus beyond the basic functions that the 83/84 do. It’d be an extra $100-$150 and it wouldn’t be necessary at all, but it’s pretty convenient when your calculator can outright do a lot of the problems on the AP Exam. The CAS was allowed on the 2012 exam, which I took, and I haven’t heard anything about a rule change.</p>
<p>I’ve used a TI-83 calculator since Algebra II and it works fine. (One of my math teachers gave it to me, which is weird, but as a rule I don’t question free stuff. I might have bought a more expensive one if I’d had to buy one on my own, but so far I haven’t needed to. I took AP Calculus BC last year.)</p>
<p>The only time I’ve ever needed to use any kind of calculator was in AP Stats, because it takes about five hundred years to compute stuff by hand, but calculus doesn’t have nearly as much computation with actual numbers (“actual numbers” being a highly technical term and everything). The arithmetic is usually simple.</p>
<p>I’m kinda thinking of maybe taking AP Calc BC and AP Stats at the same time as a senior next year :)</p>