Thanks for the article - Love the tongue in cheek theory about the shadowy figure! 🤣 This was one of the places where I had got the theory that Steve Jobs had vetoed the app on iPad.
To be fair, it raises more questions than answers... why then does the Apple Watch with its tiny screen have one but the iPad doesn't? Why was the calculator app even released if Jobs thought it was "awful?" Given this, why then has the calculator app interface not changed? Why hasn't a more iPad-oriented app been developed for the iPad (it's been 13 years so far and Jobs seemed to want one)?
Given the type of person that Jobs was portrayed as being, its highly surprising that something Jobs wanted would fall to the bottom of the To Do list. However, if there's any truth in it then I guess he had other things on his mind in his last year or two.
As for Siri, I have used Siri to perform calculations on the iPad but mainly use Siri for this on the Apple Watch due to the limited size of the screen. I had thought about this when I created the discussion but still doesn't explain Jobs' reasoning to pull a calculator from iPadOS as Siri wasn't released until a year after the first iPad. Appreciate Siri was probably in dev so may have still played a role in the decision. With MVP, surely you would release a scaled version of the iPhone app and build on it in later iterations. It also then raises the question why it [calculator] wasn't pulled from iOS too, as surely the reasoning would be the same, particularly if Jobs thought it was awful. I have even used Siri to perform calculations on the iPhone so, if Siri was indeed the reasoning behind pulling it from iPads, then I wonder if calculator will be eventually pulled from the iPhone???
Note: Appreciate that iPadOS didn't exist before 2019, which makes the decision to pull the calculator from the iPad version of iOS even more bizarre imo.
It's interesting how Siri uses the Calculator app despite it not being accessible. I think Apple must have made some enhancements since the article as Siri seems to use Calculator for the more advanced equations now too.
I think that adding a calculator app with more advanced features which take advantage of the larger screen, such as graphs, history, etc. would be great. I don't need it for my particular use case and would be more that happy for a scaled-up version, but clearly there are users out there that do with all the apps on the App Store. I guess this could explain why Apple hasn't bothered since the release but still doesn't explain why one wasn't developed initially. I wonder if we'll ever know?
