Executives confirmed Thursday that the company's calculator division remains firmly committed to offering high school students the exact same 15-megahertz processor it debuted during the Clinton administration.
Assuaging fears of sudden technological advancement, Texas Instruments announced its upcoming back-to-school hardware lineup will perfectly preserve the 96-by-64 pixel monochrome display technology that has defined secondary education for nearly three decades.
Company spokespeople noted that while the rest of the consumer electronics industry has been ravaged by Moore’s Law, the TI-84 Plus has remained an unassailable bastion of stagnation. By carefully ensuring that every trigonometry teacher in North America mandates their specific hardware on the fall syllabus, the company has successfully protected its $130 price point from the threat of modern manufacturing efficiencies.
Internal documents revealed that Texas Instruments briefly considered adding a backlight to the device in 2014, but ultimately decided that improving screen legibility would dangerously disrupt the ecosystem for teenagers trying to play a pirated version of Tetris during pre-calculus.
Rival manufacturers like Casio and Hewlett-Packard have repeatedly attempted to break the monopoly by releasing calculators with high-resolution color touchscreens for half the price. These efforts have routinely failed, as standardized testing boards strictly prohibit any device that looks like it was manufactured after the invention of Wi-Fi, citing concerns that modern silicon might give students an unfair advantage in graphing a basic parabola.
Our product roadmap for the next quarter-century is incredibly clear and aggressive. We are going to continue manufacturing the exact same plastic brick until the sun expands and swallows the Earth.
At press time, the company’s elite engineering team was reportedly hard at work figuring out how to swap the calculator's obsolete mini-USB port for USB-C without accidentally improving the device's data transfer rate.