Apple hasn’t offered its own Calculator app for the iPad since it launched it 14 years ago. Interest in the reason for this is now shifting to rumors that the company’s calculator app will finally be included in iPadOS 18 in 2024.
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Apple is expected to announce a new iPad model in May. Additionally, it is expected that new versions of iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, and macOS will be announced at WWDC in June. According to MacRumors, iPadOS 18 will include a calculator app for all supported iPad models.
There’s no official information on why the iPad hasn’t had a calculator app before, but speculation suggests that the reasons are market positioning, encouraging third-party development, and perhaps the most plausible. This is information that lies in the design philosophy. A person claiming to be a former Apple employee explained on Reddit in 2016 that Steve Jobs is the reason the iPad doesn’t have a calculator app.
“A month before the release, Steve Jobs called Scott Forstall into his office and said, ‘Where’s the new design for calculators? This is terrible.’ He said, ‘What’s the new design?’ I said, ‘This is what we’re going to ship.’ Steve said, ‘No, we can’t ship that.’ Scott backed off to keep the calculator, but we got the UI team involved and the new look for the calculator. However, it was simply not possible in such a short period of time, so we scrapped it.”
Because iPadOS is based on iOS, many of the apps originally built into iPadOS were just corresponding iOS apps stretched to fit a larger screen. It seems like a reasonable explanation that Jobs thought calculator apps that filled the entire tablet screen were an eyesore. The person, who identified himself as a former employee, concluded by saying that calculator apps have remained a low priority ever since.
In 2020, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, spoke about the native calculator app for iPad in an interview after the end of WWDC. “I want to do it when I can do it really well. And honestly, we’re not quite there yet.”
This rumor is definitely going to be one of the things to look forward to during WWDC.
This article was originally published by Red Ventures overseas and edited for Japan by Asahi Interactive.
