content: So here's the thing, although your smart phone can do everything that a TI calculator can do, a TI calculator has specific hardware for doing certain algorithms faster. However for the everyday user there is no difference and in many cases a General purpose processor might still be able to do those calculations faster, the TI calculators are $100 because of the very specific hardware that still costs just as much to produce as it did years before. For a long time you had an advantage with using dedicated hardware over a GPP type system for some more advanced mathematical type calculations. That being said, once you get into higher level math courses you aren't going to be relying on a calculator , you're going to be using Matlab / Octave or programming your own algorithms using Math libraries in C / Python / C++ etc...