About freakin’ time. Amidst all the Apple Intelligence / AI, Vision Pro, Mac, and iPhone announcements at WWDC 2024, one feature literally got a “yay” from Apple itself: the calculator app for iPad. In case you haven’t been counting, it’s taken Apple 14 — yes, — years to finally make an official calculator app for the iPad.
In typical Apple fashion, the iPad Calculator app is more than just an app for basic calculations. “It makes solving math easier than ever,” said Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi, explaining how the app works better with an Apple Pencil for the “Math Notes” feature. Tapping on the calculator button (yeah, a calculator button inside of a calculator app), you open a scratch pad where you can write out math equations.
When you write out an equal sign, Math Notes automatically displays the answer, or when you write a line underneath a table of numbers, it provides the total in . Math Notes is like a math tutor! In another demo, Apple showed how the Calculator app and Math Notes can perform expressions in a physics problem that involves solving an equation with illustrations. The demo involves changing variables and seeing how that affects an included graph.
It’s kind of, dare I say, when you see the calculations update Updates are made live as you change numbers, expressions, etc. Furthermore, Math Notes works right inside the Notes app. Why It Took So Long for Apple to Make a Calculator App Ask Apple and it’ll probably tell y.
