Will iPadOS include a calculator app?
Unbelievable sneaky 2004 Apple story: Engineers would come to our offices at midnight and practically slip machines under the door. One said, "Officially, this machine doesn't exist, you didn't get it from me, and I don't know you. Make sure it doesn't leave the building."
Just avoiding the confusion and disappointment of customers should be enough for them to do it but they haven’t done it after all these years.
Also baffling: People who will spend $600 on an iPad, but not 99¢ on a calculator app.
I sometimes wonder if Apple intentionally leaves these gaps in the ecosystem (Weather, Stocks, etc...), hoping that the market will bring forth solutions. It doesn't seem to work all the time.
Calculator (infinity-symbol) and Calc HD Pro do it the right way.
(Check '(0.1x1024-102)x10-4' on a physical calculator and on PCalc/others, it should return '0' if the math is done using bcd (almost all physical calculators) or ~5.68e-14 on broken floating point math)
If an erroneous calculator app using floating point can have success, this gives me hope to have success as well. I mean no disrespect towards the app, it just gave me a bit of extra motivation.
Because you want a quality product with some thought put in to it.
The difference in hardware (processing and screen) between e.g. a solar-polared four-function calculator and a TI-89 are representative of a difference in potential functionality and manifest with a difference in price (driven by real-world production costs).
However, one app doesn't have any less resources than another and/or doesn't have any hardware differences that would e.g. add cost if you want to visualize a graph versus compute a number -- outside of the software costs. I guess I just assume all apps are a race to the bottom here, then, because I find it mind-boggling that there aren't free apps with functionality that mimics any and all paid apps (especially in a calculator app specifically, where the dev-work is generally just _making it_ rather than inventing something new).
That all is to say: thanks -- I guess it's just a difference in features and quality comparing paid apps to free apps here. I don't really understand how that is the case (why don't people continually make cheaper/free calculators of equal quality?), but at least I understand the how. :)
It was $10 which feels like a fair and sustainable price for something like this. It's nice to understand the business model.
That said, there are lots of free calculators available.
We are absolutely spoiled by low software prices, and they’re literally spoiling the market.
An iPad pro costs 1000 bucks and your time is probably worth around 100 bucks an hour, so if an app is good and costs less than 25 bucks you shouldn’t even stop to think before buying it.
A person with a well paid job that thinks twice about paying 5 bucks for anything he could potentially use for work even once is doing it wrong.
There are lots of reasons one might spend money on a paid calculator app instead of a free one, and I'm sure this list doesn't even cover all the reasons.
A very bold claim - there are many paid-for calc apps that just use plain floating point math and don't attempt to mimic a proper calculator at all.
There are also free calc apps that DO put the work in to be a proper useful calculator.
Does much more than basic calculator stuff. Not sure how much of it requires network.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wolframalpha/id334989259?mt=...
> Not sure how much of it requires network.
The downside is that literally everything it does requires an internet connection. Even `3+7=`.
Even the scientific calculator would look pretty silly blown up that large though.
If I'm going to buy a calculator app, I might as well get a good one.
Bonus if it can do time calculators. (I used to have a physical time calculator that could do 15 hours + 3 hours, 21 minutes = x minutes, and it was surprisingly useful=.)
(I requested > 4 vertical lines a while back and he added it)