This fascinating anecdote, posted by Reddit member tangoshukudai:
It is actually a funny story. When they were prototyping the iPad, they ported the iOS calc over, but it was just stretched to fit the screen. It was there all the way from the beginning of the prototypes and was just assumed by everyone at apple that it was going to be shipped that way. A month before the release, Steve Jobs calls Scott Forstall into his office and says to him, “where is the new design for the calculator? This looks awful” He said, “what new design?” This is what we are shipping with. Steve said, “no, pull it we can’t ship that”. Scott fought for it to stay in, but he knew he had to get their UI team involved to design a new look for the calculator but there was no way they could do it in that short time frame, so they just scrapped it. It has been such low priority since then that no one cares to work on it since there is more important things to work on. (Source: I worked at Apple)
Anyone at Apple know if this is true? Definitely an interesting anecdote.
[Via iOS Dev Weekly]
There are many iPad apps that does just that: scaled up iPhone Calculator app, and my wife really LOVES them! That’s all she wants. Big calculator app that’s easy to type and see.
Prob a good call on Stves part. Why would Apple never add print to PDF?? Dumb Apple.
no idea what you’re trying to say.
This rings true, actually. The scaled up iPhone Calculator would look bad on the iPad and Steve would definately have said so. Probably the same reason there’s no native Weather app, too.
I think it’s about time they changed it, tho. AFAIC, Yahoo’s Weather app for iPad stole Apple’s lunch, but there’s no reason Apple couldn’t put a calc widget in Notification Center.
True story, confirmed by my cousin who used to work there.
I love pCalc lite as it supports RPN.
Are you uneducated, or just ignorant? You can save anything as a PDF from the share button on iOS.
So many apps seem to by ‘dying on the vine’ these days, not that I’m holding my breath for the iPad app.
“I’ll make a brief comment on the article, but then let’s talk about what I want to talk about.”
look genius, go to an email… your options are to:
flag
folder
delete
‘forward’ -> Reply/Forward/Print… to PDF? not an option – DOH! This is a very simple concept, ironically, lost on Apple.
Most things can be saved as PDF. Looks like email can’t.
Have you filed a bug report yet? Apple’s far more likely to act on that than a story here about calculators.
Have my doubts about the authenticity of the story, but if true says something about Forstall and why he’s no longer with Apple. Shipping a default app that’s non-native for a breakthrough device you’re launching? Doh.
iOS error report – at least once. I also remember some fairly major articles on tis – from some time ago… possibly even linked from this or daringfireball.net site (not that that counts, but often these people know what they write about).
While Apple usually gets it “right” and things mostly “work” – they do miss the boat from time to time … the little calculator story reminded me of this.
It’s a fairly strange omission, to be honest. I don’t really see the point of it unless they were that short on bar space (which they seem to be on my iPhone 5, but still).
There’s no native weather app for iPad either. Always thought that was odd.
Pretty sure those are co developed, compare the native weather app on iPhone to yahoo!’s, they look like they’re from the same team.
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Probably, but only Yahoo’s runs on an iPad. If they did work together, Apple’s should ask them to scale the native weather app or just install Yahoo’s app on new devices.
Personally I use this one, it is free, no ads and the design is very close to the iOS original one: https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1173365557?pt=117865237&ct=CalculatorForiPad&mt=8
This can’t be true. It has been years gone by. Apple has billions of dollars and hundreds of developers. So this anecdote is a pointless yarn and probably a face-saving fiction. Can’t a renegade Apple developer step up and give the actual technical reason? Really, no developer ever got bored one weekend and ported the app to work on the tablet?