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Apple’s annual developer conference “WWDC” was held in 2024, and various announcements were made. One that stood out among them was the addition of a calculator app to iPadOS 18. It was ridiculed that “the new feature of the iPad is a calculator!”, but it was that impactful.
iPadOS 18 finally adds a calculator app
Those who don’t use iPads may be surprised that there is no calculator app for the iPad. Of course, there is no native Apple calculator app, but you can install it from the App Store.
There is a genuine calculator app for the iPhone, so it would have been fine to just bring that to the iPad, but it seems Apple didn’t approve of that. The reason has not been officially revealed, but in 2016, a person claiming to be a former Apple employee posted on Reddit that the reason was Steve Jobs .
A Reddit post explaining why the iPad doesn’t have a calculator app
According to the report, the iPad was originally supposed to come with a version of the iPhone’s calculator app, but the app was simply stretched to fit the iPad’s screen size.
However, one month before the release of the iPad (the first iPad was released in May 2010), Jobs called Scott Forstall, then senior vice president of iOS and the driving force behind iPad software development, into his office and rejected the calculator design. Scott insisted on keeping the calculator, but Jobs did not accept this, and since there was no time to create a new design, the calculator was removed from the iPad and shipped. Even after that, the calculator app remained a low priority.
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This wasn’t the first time Jobs had rejected a calculator app. During the development of the first Macintosh, he repeatedly criticized the design of the calculator, and eventually designed the UI himself, according to Cult of Mac . It’s unclear whether the iPad episode is true, but it seems like something Jobs could have done.
After many twists and turns, it took 14 years for this calculator app to be installed on the iPad, and it was well worth the wait, as it is quite high-performance.
In addition to being able to switch between a regular calculator and a scientific calculator, it also has a unit conversion function and a history function. Another major feature is that in addition to being a simple calculator, it also has a calculation memo that can be handwritten, and it can recognize handwritten formulas and automatically calculate them. It also has a function that allows you to create a graph by writing or inputting an equation with just one tap.
Not only does it recognize handwritten mathematical expressions, it also gives answers in handwritten form.
There are several apps for Android and PC that recognize handwritten formulas and calculate them, so this is not new in itself. However, as far as I know, all of these apps recognize handwritten characters, convert them to text, and then perform calculations. In contrast, the iPad’s Calculation Memo performs calculations using handwritten text, and displays the answer using the user’s handwritten characters. It is also possible to assign values using variables.
To reproduce handwritten characters, the new feature “Smart Script” is used, which also allows you to paste typed text as handwritten characters.
Although there are some doubts about whether it is necessary to use handwriting for the calculation results, it will create a sense of uniformity in the appearance on the screen. Such an iPad calculator app will be available in iPadOS 18, which is scheduled to be released this fall. Although it is just a calculator, it seems to be an app full of Apple’s unique attention to detail.
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