If the HP manages to fix all known HP Prime bugs before next school year, that the price doesn't increase higher than the Nspire CX and that more and more people adopt the platform over the Nspire, then TI will have no choice but to adapt the Nspire to that new market.
For me, before thinking about aquiring a large(r) part (or at least non-negligible) of the market, HP will seriously have to make the Prime more professional. Not that competitors didn't have hard times with their first release, but the HP prime is competing with the Nspire CX which has years of evolution now, and bugs "everywhere" is still bad for the customer point of view- who isn't going to be lenient about bugs/crashes. They buy something, they want it to work. And the more intuitive/fast/profesionnal looking, the better. So far, I don't think the Prime targets students well enough. And if HP makes a calculator not targetted at students, then they simply can't expect to get a non-negligible market share in that field, whetether they think TI's way of doing things (like a very user-friendly CAS and interaction/display in general) is not profesionnal looking, or whatever.
Currently, the HP Prime has no ASM/C support
Officialy, I don't think it ever will. (or then, it won't probably be fit for exams, and thus HP would have abandoned the main target : students).
However we can hope that they won't take the same measures as TI does in every versions, making everything to prevent ndless.
but the calculator is MUCH faster than the TI-Nspire and offers a programming language officially on-calc programmable that does nearly as much as Lua and at much faster speed.
Yes, the Prime is much faster, and some of its Basic commands are actually not possible in Nspire Lua (let alone Basic), but on some other points, Lua's much better. It's really much of a different approach, and up to the user to like better whichever platform, in the end.
Anyway, has slow programming ever stopped coders to do what they want ? Just look at the myriad of marvelous things done in z80 and 68k Basic , for instance.
Many younger students prefer BASIC-like languages because they're easier to learn as a first programming language,
All that's great but it would have been a much more valid point like 10 years ago. Today, most of the student don't give a crap about programming on their calculators anyway, because most of them have their smartphones to lose their time on. It sure is sad, but it's the time we live in, now - and I don't think there is anything we can do to change that.
but sadly, the BASIC language on the TI-Nspire makes it a major PITA to program anything that is even close to useable by the average student.
I'll have to disagree on that. While z80, 68k and other platforms allow a mode in-depth I/O and graphics control from Basic, I challenge you to find a better platform for math-oriented programming than the Nspire's Basic.
And as I just said, when students program on their calcultor, it's mainly because they have to do it, so they won't care much about having ASM capabilities or not, for example, they wouldn't have used it anyway, since they must be forced to program to consider looking at Basic programming in the first place.
on the other side, the small community of students who enjoy programming on such devices will obviously find the Prime's Basic way more powerful than the Nspire's in terms of raw programming capabilities and speed.
And on the Nspire, they can look at Lua scripting, and if they can depending on their device/OS, C and ASM.
Anyway, conclusion for that part : the "average student", as you say, will be largely satisfied enough with the Nspire's Basic. (and probably 20% of the features will be used).
Sadly we can't judge if the HP Prime will compete well, because it came out one month after back-to-school 2013, after most students had already purchased another calculator, but there already seems to be a decent amount of users on HP Museum (their daily forum activity even rivals Cemetech and Omni now, even with a batshit insane registration system)
Well, early-adopters' peak, I guess. We can only wait and see in the future what TI's response to the Prime will be (if they ever feel the need to actually respond. They are so powerful onthe market that they wouldn't really need to take harsh measures to keep their market share)
If TI did some efforts in not providing us an half-hassled TI-BASIC language and made it and Lua as fast as HP PPL, then maybe we wouldn't be complaining as much.
Sure. Although the 2x faster processor isn't there for nothing
If they just can't find ways to make both languages faster, then why won't they just upgrade the processor to 400 MHz or something? It's not like they'll ruin themselves doing so, considering how cheap processors are nowadays.
They certainly can (and, well, TI knows about microprocessors.....), and they most probably will, but when
they decide it's going to be needed.
Again, do average student need 400 MHz to calculate a derivative (at best...) ? Nope. Programmers (probably a too small part of the customer base to actually weight in the balance enough) may, however, to do advanced stuff that would be slower otherwise.
So that's why, I think, they just don't feel the need to upgrade the hardware to a better one, that might cost a little bit more.
And instead of trying in every way to block every Ndless program, why won't TI just try to find ways to make the teacher mode impossible to hack? That's the only reason why they're blocking Ndless after all.
Well, nothing is never hackable anyway
And the point of Ndless is not to mess with the teacher stuff like PTT. It just opens doors. What some users decide then to do is their own choice...
Several solutions (like having a separate, open Nspire system where native coding is allowed and documented, and a exam-reserved OS where it would be closed (but which native developers wouldn't care about anyways since the other OS is there)) have been proposed to TI. Even though it's unlikely they will adpot such measures, we can at least say we have tried to discuss for the good of all.