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Comment by pjmorris | Hacker News Reader

How can you not love this:

> HP typically priced their equipment at the cost of the material list × π (or in an especially competitive market, list × e)

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The founders of HP were just so much cooler than the business school goons like Fiorina who practically drove it into the ground.

That pricing formula is so playful, as is "well I want one and so do my engineers".

Chapeau Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

Ha ha, practically? She did. Keysight is what’s left of the original HP.

HP is now known for garbage computers and shitty printers.

And the ironic part of that is that the original HP was spun-off two times (at first Agilent, then Keysight).

And calculators...?

The new calculators are abominations, with the exception of the 35s. I use those at work, so I didn’t have to break the seal on a 32Sii; the precious.

I have an HP Prime. I use it daily. It’s CAS isn’t exactly Mathematica-grade but it’s perfectly adequate for my daily purposes.

I feel that they're getting their legs back under their consumer division, although I agree their laptops have been really mediocre.

However I have enjoyed using their enterprise workstations for the last 10 years are so (various models of Z4xx's) and haven't had any complaints.

The Bestec PSUs were often the weakest link - and a non-standard size (and wiring ISTR) so you couldn't replace them with just anything.

I've had good experiences with their EliteBook lines. Solid machines, if you are closer to the rugged notebook vs thin trophy book on the scale of laptop thickness.

They try forcing the Z series on me at work. I have bought Microway workstations. Much better bang for the buck, and better build quality.

OTOH, if you are engineer faced with the problem of picking some number between the respective economical constraints (ie. pick a number not much higher than 2.25 or not much higher than 3, both of which are somewhat well known estimates of manufacturing overhead) you are somewhat likely to come up with these two transcendentals.

At most hardware companies, this is the starting point. As in, a flat multiple is the baseline, before S&M and other overheard costs are re-integrated by Finance into product cost.

Indeed. Same thing when I was a hardware engineer. However, I think the GP loves it due to the use of Pi and 'e' as the constants. We used 3 I seem to remember, but we included some amount for assembly and test, which I bet would come close to Pi.

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