The humble pocket calculator may not be able to keep up with the mathematical capabilities of new technologies, but it will never hallucinate.
The device’s long-term reliability equates to millions of sales each year for Japan’s Casio, which is even considering expanding into some regions.
Despite the dazzling progress in artificial intelligence, chatbots still sometimes stumble over basic additions.
On the other hand, “calculators always give the right answer,” Tomoaki Sato, director of Casio, told AFP.
But he admitted that calculators might one day go the way of the abacus.
“It is undeniable that the market for personal calculators used in business is on a downward trend,” Sato said in Tokyo.
Smartphones and web browsers can handle daily sums, while AI models achieved gold-level scores for the first time this year in a prestigious global maths competition.
But calculators are more affordable than phones and run on batteries and solar power — a benefit for schools in developing countries, a potential growth area for Casio, Sato said.
And people who buy calculators prefer how they feel, he argued.
Thitinan Suntisubpool, co-owner of a store selling red bags and attractive cats in Bangkok’s Chinatown, said she liked the durability of her big calculator, after dropping it several times.
“It’s more convenient in many ways,” the 58-year-old told AFP.
“We can use it to press the numbers and show them to the customer,” thus avoiding misunderstandings caused by the language barrier.
But at a nearby street stall selling clocks, torches and calculators, the saleswoman, who goes by the name Da, said calculator sales were “calm.”
At a Casio factory in Thailand, assembly line workers set up green circuit boards and popped cuboid buttons labeled “LED” from a plastic container onto pastel blue calculator frames.
“Calculators are always in high demand,” said Ryohei Saito, general manager of Casio in Thailand.
“Smartphone connectivity is not available everywhere in the world, and calculators are optimized tools focused on necessary functions,” he said.
Until March 2025, Casio has sold 39 million calculators, general and scientific, in around a hundred countries.
This compares to 45 million in 2019-20, but is still up from 31 million sold the following year after the Covid-19 pandemic.
The company has come a long way since the 1957 invention of the desk-sized “14-A”, which it claims was the first all-electric compact calculator.
The calculator story even made headlines recently when Christie’s suspended the sale in Paris of an early calculating machine, “La Pascaline”, after a court ruled it could not be exported.
The auction house called the ebony-decorated 1642 device “history’s first attempt to replace the human mind with a machine.”
These attempts have accelerated with AI.
In July, AI models created by Google, OpenAI and DeepSeek reached gold level at the annual International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).
But neither achieved full marks in the annual under-20 competition, unlike five human participants who achieved perfect scores.
IMO President Gregor Dolinar called the progress of artificial intelligence in this area “fascinating”.
“When we talk about scientific calculators, in the past we needed them, but today it is easier to go to AI,” he explains to AFP.
“If you ask the question in the right way,” artificial intelligence can solve abstract, logical questions and show how it arrived at its conclusion, Dolinar said.
Dolinar, an engineering professor at the University of Ljubljana, thinks physical computers will likely “slowly disappear.”
Something that has already happened to his students.
“They can calculate everything on a phone,” he said.
