Apple executive Craig Federighi helped unveil iPadOS 14 at WWDC 2020, but there was no Calculator app yet.
Screenshot: Apple
Apple chief software officer Craig Federighi has just answered a question that has puzzled people for years: why doesn’t the iPad come with a calculator app?
In a video released Friday, he also explained why the iPad lacks a weather app.
Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, gave the reasons for both decisions in a YouTube question-and-answer video presented by Marques Brownlee.
Where is the iPad Calculator app?
Steve Jobs rejected Apple’s original tablet calculator because it was boring, nothing more than the iPhone app explicitly expanded to the size of iPad. But that doesn’t explain why the company failed to create a proper iPad calculator app in the decade after the tablet launched.
When the wraps came out of iPadOS 14 at WWDC 2020 on Monday, there was still There is no calculator app to be seen. Federighi admits that Apple simply hasn’t created an app that will get people to say, “This is the best iPad calculator app.”
“There are some things that we haven’t done because we would like to do something really remarkable in that space,” said Apple’s vice president. “We want to do it when we can do it really, really well. And, honestly, we have not been able to do it wonderfully. ”
But he didn’t close the door on the idea of an iPad calculator. “That day may come,” said Federighi.
Why isn’t there an iPad Weather app?
Many people are also wondering about an iPad version of the iPhone Weather app. Touch the Weather widget on an Apple tablet, and the Weather Channel web page opens in its place.
Federighi’s explanation of the climate deficit echoes Apple’s reasoning for the lack of an iPad calculator app. “It would be pretty easy to extend our existing Weather app, but we felt, ‘What would be an excellent weather app for iPad?'” He said. “Let’s do that before we do it.”
Watch the video with Federighi answering all Brownlee’s questions on YouTube:
