[jcrawfordor]

The NSpire OS is significantly more usable than the 83+ and 89 that I went through school with. In one case, I was able to put a dataset acquired from measurements into the spreadsheet editor, run a linear regression, get the r^2 for the regression, then draw the graph of points and line and save it in just a few seconds of menu choices - without ever having done that on an NSpire before. This would have taken me significantly longer on the older models if I hadn't already memorized the procedure.

So I wouldn't say that the NSpire has any radically new features, but I think that it's a lot more approachable then the older models. It feels less like something that you have to specifically learn to use and more like an intuitive software package - which is perhaps what our author is really getting at when they talk about apps.