[emsy]

The iPad is the „you’re holding it wrong“ philosophy applied to the whole OS. The problem is Apple is unable to make tradeoffs, which is exemplified by the lack of a calculator app because „you can’t just take the iPhone calculator and resize it for the iPad“ (yes you can and it’s better than not having a calculator so at all).

[mejutoco]

I wrote an article about the lack of calculator for the ipad, and an actual port of the ios calculator as a PWA, if anybody misses this app on the ipad. Free, no ads.

https://mejuto.co/the-ipad-did-not-have-a-calculator-so-i-po...

[dinckelman]

They could have EASILY done it back at the original launch. They had everything necessary to get it done, except for common sense.

Even with the skeuomorphic design, split half for the history, half for a regular calculator. Flip it sideways, get a scientific calculator

[ghaff]

On the other hand, I'll argue pretty strongly that the determination of the Wintel ecosystem to make a one-size fits all tablet/laptop compromise is precisely one of the major reasons why such a device never really took off--including in the case of the Microsoft Surface.

[WillAdams]

I dunno.

I've bought more pen computers running Windows than I can easily count (and am still salty that Apple has yet to make a replacement for my Newton --- an iPhone w/ Apple Pencil support would be pretty close).

The big problem is that they've followed Apple/Android's lead in "dumbing down" the stylus input to an 11th touch input for many cases --- even now, in Windows 11 I have to leave the Settings app open on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 so that I can toggle stylus modes between working w/ legacy apps (Macromedia Freehand/MX) and current applications (OpenSCAD Graph Editor).

That aid, I've gotten to the point where I'm about to give up -- most likely my next major tech purchase will be either a Wacom Movink 13 or a Wacom One 13" (Gen2) w/ Touch and a Raspberry Pi 5.

[jwells89]

Definitely. XP/Vista tablets had more weaknesses than strengths, and while Windows 8/10/11 tablets corrected many of the missteps of their predecessors the overall experience still wasn’t as compelling as that of an iPad, despite the versatility of Windows and limitations of iPadOS.

Part of that was due to x86 tablets either being hot and noisy with awful battery life or severely underpowered, though. While there would still be software issues (like traditional Windows apps not being touch-friendly) and privacy concerns (Recall), Snapdragon X powered tablets might finally fix at least the hardware woes of Windows tablets.

[emsy]

My wife is on her third Surface because she can work on them. Meanwhile her iPad is used for YouTube and Netflix. The surface is a bad tablet but a great computer. I think the iPad has potential to be the tablet computer and it doesn’t need a dual boot into MacOS to achieve it, but the current app model with files as second class citizens, no real background processing and no child processes is just too restrictive for most professional workflows. In the end most apps need to export their result to a real computer, which means the iPad is not a real computer.

[kergonath]

Which is why there always have been hundreds of calculator apps, from the crudest to the most polished. How is that a problem? Sure, it’s nice to have one out of the box, but is this really a problem?

[nkozyra]

> The problem is Apple is unable to make tradeoffs

I think the problem is they're very conscious of cannabalizing their own product line.

If the average person could use a $500 iPad ($399 + keyboard + mouse) instead of a bare minimum macbook air ($1000+), they would.

[emsy]

I agree, but this is a new problem for Apple. The iPhone was famously introduced as a cannibalizing product.