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."
iPads still don't have a calculator app? I find that baffling.
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.
bigger screen to see memes on. iPads are NOT uber popular because creators like them, they're popular coz it's a giant beautiful screen you can watch netflix/instagram on
PCalc does its math wrong (using floating point), and probably isn't what you want.
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)
This is amazing! I've seen 2 recommendations for PCalc in this thread alone.
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.
I'm not sure how to ask this without it sounding anything other than genuinely curious, but it is: why would you spend money on a calculator app? What does it offer that other (free) calculator apps don't? Are free apps just so crippled that you need to pay for something full-featured and/or without something like ads? I'm not familiar with the iOS/iPadOS ecosystem.
You could ask a similar question to physical calculators, I think. Why would you pay for an advanced calculator when you can get the cheap-o solar powered calculators for free in many many places?
Because you want a quality product with some thought put in to it.
Well, I bought the nice physical calculators because I needed the functionality that they provided over the cheapo calculators.
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. :)
I spent, what, $50 or more on a calculator toolkit for the Mac about 25 years ago, just because it was such cool software. Never got any value out of it, just fun.
We are absolutely spoiled by low software prices, and they’re literally spoiling the market.
Why would you NOT spend money on a calculator app if it’s better, or you just fancy it?
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.
A paid calculator app might be better designed than a free one. Or it might not have ads, when a free one does. Or it being paid could mean that it'll be better supported with any necessary bugfixes and updates. Or the fact that it's a paid app could imply that it's better designed or better supported (without necessarily being true). Or perhaps you really care about something particular that the paid calculator app does right in your eyes, and the free ones simply don't have.
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.
My point is that 'it costs money' is sadly not a way to gauge good calculators on ios, and a lot of the 'costs money' ones don't even have a free option to test/check-the-precision.
Note that I never said cost was a way to gauge good calculators. I was merely answering the question of why one might pay for a calculator app instead of using one of the many free ones. Again, this is why I very deliberately said "might" in all of my statements. By saying "might", I'm also implying "might not"...
There's also PCalc lite which is free. I bought full PCalc, but had them both on my phone for awhile until I eventually deleted the lite version. I rarely needed the full version, though I was happy to help support a developer doing good work by buying the full version.
I also like Wolfram Alpha. It has all the data, isn’t just a calculator, so I can enter in English `GDP of USA divided by land area` and get an answer. And a graph. And automatic currency conversions.
> Not sure how much of it requires network.
The downside is that literally everything it does requires an internet connection. Even `3+7=`.
IIRC phone-mode apps that allow it can run on an iPad in a framed mode so they don't look too weird. I get why they don't do that with the calculator because it'd be "poor UX" but "what do you mean I spent $1200 on this and there's no fucking calculator, my Apple phone and laptop both have one, you mean I gotta go sort through the app store to find something that's not gonna show me ads, then probably pay some more money on top of that $1200, to get a calculator, I mean there was one in Windows 3.1 FFS" is even worse UX.
Can someone recommend a good programmer's calculator for the iPad?
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=.)
