Derek and Melissa’s Family

Apple Calculator

by Derek—2006.01.08 @ 1530

My rating: -1 out of 5

I was hoping some day I’d be able to give a “black cloud” review, but I never expected it would be an Apple product. Actually, I’m very dissappointed that it is an Apple program, one that should be very simple: a calculator.

Melissa was doing some simple math—addition—when she turned to me to check her figures. She knew that the results were wrong and I couldn’t believe it. I worked the addition by hand and then tried the calculator to find the same error:

 Equasion   Correct  Apple Calculator
 ---------+--------+---------------
 286 + 20 = 306      310
 386 + 10 = 396      400
 198 + 10 = 208      210

I quickly checked the calculator widget, and it gets the math correct. Odd. I then thought that the calculator was doing some serious rounding, but even that didn’t make sense. Then I finally found (I think) what the problem was: precision. Under the View menu, there is a list under Precision that lets you pick how precise? the calculator is? It has a scale from 0 to 16. My calculator was set to 2. After I put it up to 16, the calculator actually did correct math.

Even though I found the problem, I still think this stinks. I really can’t think of any situation where you would want a calculator to give the wrong answer on a simple addition problem. I thought that precision was meant to be applied to decimal points, and that “precision” meant how precise to be out to X-number of decimal places. Apparently “precision” to Apple’s calculator means how lazy it will be in adding numbers.

“Oh, it’s close enough to ‘200’ — let’s just round up.”

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