You open the Spotlight Search tool when you pull down on the Home Screen or Lock Screen. Instead, it takes various forms, and each has its own benefit. However, there is a calculator on your iPad it's just not an app like on the iPhone. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said in 2020 that it was because they'd want to build something 'really distinctly great in that space,' and that Apple hasn't 'gotten around to doing it great.' He hinted, 'that day may come,' but there are too many great options in the App Store already. Now, over 12 years later, there still is no official iPadOS calculator app from Apple - not even in iPadOS 16 (which finally added the Weather app).

Steve Jobs caught wind of it and quickly nixed it, and there wasn't enough time to design an iPad-optimized calculator before the iPad hit shelves. But that doesn't mean your iPad doesn't have an official calculator.īefore the first iPad in 2010, Apple's development team did have an iPad calculator ready to go, but it was just a scaled-up version of the iPhone app. There is no iPad version of Apple's Calculator app, so you won't find it on your Home Screen, in your App Library, or as a shortcut in the Control Center.