A $50 tablet and a $220 desktop calculator were released within a day of one another

Casio released a calculator and Amazon released a tablet within 24 hours of each other this week. That alone is unremarkable. One costs $220, the other costs $50. That, too, wouldn’t raise many eyebrows, until you realize which is which.

The $220 calculator is the Casio S100. Yes, that’s right, 220 bucks for a calculator. It’s not a graphing calculator, or a calculator app in showier hardware, either. It is a sit-on-your-desk, square-rooting, 12-digit calculator, the kind you last saw atop your parents’ conquered tax returns in the early ’90s. The $50 tablet is the latest Amazon Fire, a 7-inch, 8-gig, quad-core, decent-battery-life, watch-movies-and-download-apps, mini, mobile, touchscreen computer. It offers your choice of, among many, many other things, well over 3,000 free calculator apps.

This disparity between the cheap new product and the expensive retro one seems insane, but it is not. Each makes perfect sense, in its way, and reminds us just how wonderful technology can be, in just how many ways.

veya_victaous wrote:having read the article

The Calculator is EVEN WORSE value than it seems
the supposed justification is it is a 50 year anniversary model and it has a couple of bucks worth of metal in the exterior