Hi guys,
I’m trying to buy the platinum 25th edtion through amazon.co.u or ebay.co.uk , but i could not find anything that says it’s the 25th edintion and the pictures there mislead me !! is the platinum one thesedays concedered as 25th edtion or still there is a different ? i found 30th edtion which some ppl says the 25th is nicer and has the same processor and same speed. any advice ?
thanks all
I have the 30th anniversary one. It is very nice, fast and looks like the original “gold” 12c. It doesn’t have ALG mode, so you have to know RPN to use it. You can buy it direct from HP at this site.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/215348-215348-64232-20036-215349-5154839.html?dnr=1
How are they selling 30-year-old electronics for $80? Someone could program the iPhone app for this in like 2 hours.
thanks guys for replying, i bought the BA2 and it drove me nut !! first i found that the calculator is programmed on the chain method wich is completely different from the algebraic method so if i key 2+3*5 , the answer is 25 and not 17 !! so i changed it and i sorted it out but then i realized i could not see what i keyed and could not see the brackets ! so i though to move to HP c12 i took some tutorials on youtube and learned it so i desided to buy one, the only question i could not find is, is there any deffrence between the HP c12 platinum and the 25th edtion or they are exactly the same? performance or qualtiy, or anything.
ohai i wish i know the answer
regards
The 12c platinum and the 25th anniversary edition are essentially the same thing. I would just go ahead and buy the platinum version, becasue I think some of the original 25th anniversary 12cs had bugs. The 30th anniversary is like the original 12c, without algebraic mode, but is much faster.
Of course the problem is you wouldn’t be able to bring the phone into the CFA exam, but you could bring the calculator… :-/
I actually did have an iPhone app that was an HP 12C calculator. It required a jailbroken phone to install.
30 year old electronics for $80, now that’s a brand value. 
12c - 1/10th the functionality, 10x the badass!
One look at its brushed plastic exterior and you think: “Damn, this thing is pro. ”Excel Mobile, it speaks a pure, unambiguous language: Reverse Polish, a postfix notation that eliminates non-commutative issues. So instead of having to enter 7 + (5 * 2) – 5, you’d enter: 7 5 2 * + 5 -. Direct and to the point, crisp even—exactly how Bankers think and speak. I met a model from Kraków once, and although we hit it off physically, her English struggled, blocking us from that real “same plane” level I like to reach. So as a gesture of cultural sensitivity, I decided I’d speak to her in something closer to her native tongue. Over Lil’s Wayne’s Lollipop, I pointed between us aggressively and instructed: “You, friends, 2, TIMES PLUS… panties MINUS“ Boom. “Same plane,” said her eyes.
The 12C is bad ass. I always felt like a pro walking in the tests with my 12c next to all these people with a calculator that looks like the calculators they hand out for free in elementary school.
^ Respect. Real financiers use the 12c.
12c = BSD
BAII = BOM
The HP12C is actually HP’s longest and best-selling product (sold since 1981). It does everything you need it to do, quickly and efficiently. It’s aesthetically pleasing and well-built to boot, and should last you a lifetime with proper care.
Oddly, it’s in the vast minority on CFA exams. I rarely see people with it. In fact, I’d guess that as many people walk in with two BAII’s as do with one HP12C (the former behavior being extremely odd). Then again, those types also bring 15 pencils and two mega-erasers. I used the same two mechanical pencils for each of the 4 times I took the tests (failed L2 once), and barely made a dent in one of the nubby erasers. That’s just me though.
12c - 1/10th the functionality, 10x the badass!
One look at its brushed plastic exterior and you think: “Damn, this thing is pro. ”Excel Mobile, it speaks a pure, unambiguous language: Reverse Polish, a postfix notation that eliminates non-commutative issues. So instead of having to enter 7 + (5 * 2) – 5, you’d enter: 7 5 2 * + 5 -. Direct and to the point, crisp even—exactly how Bankers think and speak. I met a model from Kraków once, and although we hit it off physically, her English struggled, blocking us from that real “same plane” level I like to reach. So as a gesture of cultural sensitivity, I decided I’d speak to her in something closer to her native tongue. Over Lil’s Wayne’s Lollipop, I pointed between us aggressively and instructed: “You, friends, 2, TIMES PLUS… panties MINUS“ Boom. “Same plane,” said her eyes.
That’s obviously your viewpoint. There are others.
As a computer science graduate, I can tell you that the RPN notation in the HP12C is actually very refreshing and representative of how a computer manipulates numbers. When it comes to finance and accounting, learning how to correctly implement a series of calculations using postfix notation is highly efficient and can lead to fewer user input errors.
Hi All and thanks for the advices
last week I was browsing the amazon and I found an AD about HP c12 platinum and it was really cheap so i rodered 2 calcs, when they arrived and I opened the box I was totaly surprised, I realized they have sent my the 30th edition !!! i sent them an email and they apologised and told me that the dont know there is diff kinds and they said in order to fix this mistake they are going to refund me and let me keep the calcs !! what I gift !! I was jumping around hahahah cuz I paid 113 pound !! so i thought to sell them and buy the platinum
Just plain old inflation. It has good solid buttons to press, and I’m not going to take a 6-hour test with a cheap chincy calculator. Anything else that was 25 dollars 30 years ago is likely to cost $80 today, too. I can’t imagine it’s that much more than what you pay for your iPhone and all those silly apps on it every single month, either. 
For your amusement:
These things were over $100 bucks when they frist came out in 1981.
So they did get cheaper then. How much cheaper do you expect them to get? Every time I try to use one of those chincy TI calculators, I have to check, did I really press that button at all, or did I press it twice, or did I hit the next button instead? The cheaper TIs are flaky as anything, too. I’ve had TI calculators break and quit working just before an exam (not the CFA) before. They’re just worthless pieces of junk. You can buy a better calculator at the dollar store.
Those old HP calculators are built solid, and they have solid buttons with good tactile feedback — which means fewer mistakes in a high-stress time-limited situation like an exam. Sorry about the misinformation regarding price — just don’t expect everything to get cheaper over time, and then complain they don’t make them like they used to.
Yeah they definitely got cheaper, but they’re still expensive, but worth it. I still use mine everyday and have one for home and one for work, although for anything complicated I use Excel. Esthetically, the 12c can’t be beaten. I do like the tactile responce that you get from the 12c and the old ones used to blink when you hit Enter, so you never had to guess if the number you entered actually registered. Also, RPN makes it so fast when you’r trying to get through a long equation on an exam like a 3 asset portfolio standard deviation or something. I hope these things never come off the market.
Yep, that tacticle response is very nice. Why no one else has figured that part out is something that puzzles me.
RPN is also amazingly useful. It’s really hard to describe to someone who doesn’t use it, but once you have the hang of it, you really don’t worry too much about how complex the calculation is.
There’s an app for the HP12c for Iphone in the Appstore, at least in Brazil. The touch screen does not feel very accurate though, so it makes things much slower.
I have 2 of them - both gold - one is around 15 years old and the other is pretty new. They look the same, but the old one takes forever to calculate IRR. The new one is a little annoying in which I can’t type the same number twice or thrice too fast (it won’t register).
Funny thing is that I got so used to RPN that I can barely use a regular calculator now - gotta be extra careful to avoid “RPNing” it.
… but the main point, in my opinion, is not whether or not it’s worth $80 give or take, but that it’s worth taking the time to learn to use the thing not just for basic arithmetic, but the NPV, IRR, amortization, etc., which really save time on the exam whenever you can set up a problem to take advantage of these functions, (which is more often than you might think.)
Well, I’d imagine it might add a few pennies to the manufacturing cost. Also, engineered obsolescence is almost universal in consumer goods: most companies seem to have the attitude that building better quality durable goods of any sort will cut into sales over time because the old ones won’t break or flake out fast enough to create demand for replacement.
I won’t buy a printer unless it’s an HP, either. I just hope HP doesn’t make any more stupid decisions like the Autonomy deal. They entirely skipped over the process known as due diligence, which was mentioned in the reading on mergers and acquisitions. They could have done a lot of due diligence for, oh, let’s say $10 million, before making a $11 b illion dollar purchase. And yet management and board of directors professed the same level of ignorance as Joe Blow reading Yahoo! Finance regarding the deal.
Unfortunately, HP’s quality and brand won’t mean anything if they can’t get their corporate governance in order so they can stay in business. First it was Compaq, and then it was Autonomy. They won’t be in business long if they can’t stop throwing away all their profits on stupid acquisitions.