Why the iPad doesn’t have a Calculator!
Today, where our digital devices carry our entire identities, it’s pretty common to presumptuously assume that even a new OS will come with the basic set of tools and software required to do basic tasks like calculation, note-taking, spreadsheets, etc. But what if I told you that even 13 years after its release, the iPad doesn’t have a calculator app. Are you shocked? Even I was when I first knew about it. But is there any reason behind it? Yes, there is. Let’s find out…
So, the story begins with young Steve Jobs, one month before the launch of the Macintosh in 1984 and his passion towards excellence and perfection. In the true sense, “perfection never exists, it’s pathological.”, but for Steve, it was a way to achieve excellence. And when he saw the calculator app for the Macintosh, he was immediately disappointed with its design and asked the group of designers to redo the design of it. But with every iteration of the app, Steve found new flaws, so at last, it was Steve Jobs who designed the calculator app for the Macintosh. This incident shows us how religious Jobs was with his design philosophy and how he wanted to incorporate a sense of excellence in every aspect of his products.
And since we know that “history repeats itself”, it was pretty sure that this incident would knock at Steve’s door again. 26 years after the successful launch of the Macintosh, Apple was about to release a product which would basically bridge the gap between a computer and a smartphone. And for them, it had to be revolutionary. But a month before the launch of the iPad, Jobs saw the calculator app (again) for the iPad and hated it. The software for the iPad was developed by then Senior Vice-President for Software, Scott Forstall and he basically blew up the existing Calculator app for the iPhone in terms of size and used it for the iPad. This might still be a very effective way of doing it even today but didn’t resonate with Steve Jobs’s zeal towards excellence.
In the pursuit of providing the best iPad calculator, Jobs gave an ultimatum to Forstall about redesigning the app or it won’t be included. But due to lack of time, Forstall never made it & the iPad never came with a calculator app since its launch.
But being a $3 trillion company today, why did the Cupertino-giant has still not managed to make a simple calculator app for one of its driving products? The answer is in the company’s ideals and philosophy laid by its founder. Apple as a company always wants to provide an excellent experience to their customers & to achieve that, they might make the user experience of their products sterile so that they can release each & every feature with absolute excellence instead of simply providing them in the first place.
In a recent interview with Marques Brownlee, when Craig Federighi, SVP of Software, was asked about the same, he replied “We’ve not done because to do it, we would want to do something really distinctly great in that space”, and this shows the commitment of Apple towards excellence even though it’s fairly easy to make a calculator app.
But it’s absolutely high time that Apple does something about it. For a company of that calibre, a calculator should be fairly easy to make & deploy. And Apple avoiding it, even being completely aware of it, feels like ignorance towards consumers’ needs and demands. I hope they will present a revolutionary calculator app for the iPad in their next developer conference, i.e. WWDC’24.
