[wgetch]

This is unfortunate, assembly programs were the strongest aspect of the TI homebrew community. Some really great games and applications were made possible by native binaries on the older TI calculators. A couple of details I found in another article[1]:

- The new OS prevents the calculators from being downgraded

- The OS prevents running Asm/C programs, only Basic (and on some editions Python) programs are allowed

- Applications can still be installed if signed by approved TI vendors

Sounds like the TI homebrew community is about to get splintered. You'll have the jailbreakers fighting for code execution, but this could easily end up a small underground operation mirroring other jailbreak efforts. It could become too much of a hassle to get asm programs back (custom OS?), if so most people will accept the limitations and move on. At least there's still Basic and Python, if nothing else.

[1] https://www.cemetech.net/news/2020/5/949/_/ti-removes-asmc-p...

[saagarjha]

This is basically just a repeat of how other platforms locked down code execution on their devices. Hopefully TI is incompetent enough to make jailbreaking trivial, but it opens up a cat-and-mouse game…

[kick]

TI is fairly competent overall. That said, maybe the bottom 10% get sent to the calculator division, given that it's barely moved since 1980...

[dsjimi]

Less than 5% of their revenue is calculators, and much less than 5% of their R&D or engineering budgets. It's an incredibly small part of their business.

[epanchin]

5% of revenue requiring much less than 5% of engineering time sounds like an awesome part of a business. Hardly small, either.

[goatinaboat]

It serves the purpose of exposing future engineers to the TI brand during a formative period too

[andrepd]

It's sad that this is happening to essentially every computing platform.

[randtrain34]

It's still possible on the TI-84 series right?

[saagarjha]

TI-84 calculators have not seen an update in ages, so I doubt that TI will add restrictions to them now. I think they'd just rather push people to the "CE" calculators. (Which I personally dislike for other reasons, but I digress…)

[ihuman]

> TI-84 calculators have not seen an update in ages

The last update for the TI-84 Plus CE came out about 11 months ago. Its not recent, but it wasn't ages ago.

https://education.ti.com/en/software/search/ti-84-plus-ce