Incomprehensibly there is no calculator app on the iPad or at least not natively. Apple, jealous of its good work for the simple and optimized interfaces, has on occasion shown its reasons for this, claiming that it would be like “stretching” the iPhone app and that would look bad. Reason understandable or not but we must abide by not having this possibility in the apple tablet. However, there are options to have a calculator even without installing anything and in this article we will tell you how.
Siri can be the iPad calculator
The experience may not be the same as manually typing into a calculator interface, but Apple’s smart assistant also found on iPads has the ability to perform some mathematical operations.
The first thing to keep in mind is that Siri must be activated . If you are not sure about it, you should go to Settings> Siri and Search and check here that the assistant is fully available on your device. Once this is done, you can access it through the voice command “Hey Siri” or by pressing the Home button (lock button on iPad Pro 2018 and later and on iPad Air 2020 and later).
Well, what calculations can Siri do? Well, unfortunately very few. You will not be able to ask for complex operations such as square roots and the like, but it will be useful in some cases where you have to do some quick addition or subtraction, as well as multiplication and division. It even admits decimals, although “comma” must be said to differentiate them, since any other word does not identify it correctly.
Depending on the circumstances, it may not be entirely comfortable for you to dictate operations by voice, so you can configure the ability to write written commands to Siri. All this can be done from the aforementioned assistant’s settings panel, although the downside is that you will have to change this configuration every time you want to use it again by voice.
Use Safari to perform calculations
This way is not the most comfortable to carry out operations either, since you need to have an internet connection and use the iPad browser, which can be perfectly Safari or any other. For this, what you really access is Google and the calculator tool. Depending on the operation you do, you can write it directly or not, but the recommendation we make is to write “calculator” directly in the search engine so that the tool appears.
Free application, although with advertising
Good, pretty and free. This application is fully functional and has functions that allow access to content from a scientific calculator, so it can be even more decisive than a hypothetical native Apple app. There are many other apps in the App Store with similar functions, so it is not really the only app, but it is one of the ones we use in this writing for our mathematical tasks and it is comfortable. Of course, instead of its free price, we find advertising that can only be removed with its paid version of 5.49 euros per week, which we see as excessive even for those who require these functions often.
In any case, you can take a look at an article in which we recommend the best calculator apps on iOS, which also work for iPadOS.