iPadOS 18 Review (ish): Math notes, calculator, and weird tab bars
This year, there’s good news on the iPadOS front: A bunch of features that in recent years might have been limited to iOS are also available in iPadOS 18! For example, the ability to customize home screens is going to change the look of iPad screens—and iPad users won’t have to wait until the fall of 2025 to get what iPhone users got the year before. I like this trend. (See Dan’s full review of iOS 18 for more on the full details of that release.)
Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that’s special for iPad users. There are really only a handful of new features. They’re interesting, and very iPad, but there aren’t a lot of them. And, of course, the iPad joins the iPhone in waiting for Apple Intelligence features, whenever those arrive.
Handwritten notes
I have terrible handwriting and I hate writing by hand. But for you, dear reader, I have picked up my Apple Pencil and written many paragraphs in Notes on iPadOS 18.
Apple has given handwriting a serious upgrade in iPadOS 18. It’s treating text written with the Apple Pencil as text, essentially. You can select words and copy the text, sure, but what’s new is the ability to edit that text. Misspelled words will be marked and can be tapped to correct them, and words can be deleted and inserted.
This is all enabled by a new subsystem that learns your handwriting, meaning it can insert or change words without giving the corrected text an incongruous look. It’s not perfect—Apple unbelievably was not able to perfectly synthesize my unreadable chicken scratch—but it’s close enough not to seem jarring. Apple’s engine also works to realign what you write, cleaning up messy words or lines so that it’s all more readable—again, something it couldn’t do if it wasn’t able to generate a synthetic version of your handwriting.
I can’t speak to what the experience will be like for people with good handwriting, but I was pretty impressed with what iPadOS managed to do. It recognized most of my words (and let me copy and paste them as plain text) and even cleaned up a little bit of my messy writing. I could’ve used though maybe not enough—it was still pretty illegible).
Let’s be honest: I’m never going to be the target audience for this feature. I’m very impressed that it works, and for people who prefer to take notes in longhand, this will make the entire experience better.
Calculator and Math Notes
The iPad has, for some reason, not had a built-in calculator app since its inception. I have no idea why this was the case, and there have been many third-party apps to fill the gap, but in iPadOS 18 Apple has finally included an iPhone version of its basic calculator app. It’s silly it took this long, but it’s a good move.
Of course, Apple couldn’t leave it at that. So the Calculator app has added a new iPad-only feature, Math Notes. (You can also use it inside Notes.) In Notes across iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia you can type math problems and get them answered by typing the equals symbol, but only on iOS can you write them out by hand as you would on a piece of paper, and watch in awe as they are solved for you by a magical elf that lives inside your iPad.
Math notation is hard to type, but it’s easy to write, making it a perfect fit for the Apple Pencil. And it worked pretty well for me, allowing me to change variables and watch as the answer changed. This is a great idea, and I want Apple to keep pushing in this direction, because (especially for students) it’s a much more natural way to do math than using a calculator or typing equations in with a keyboard.
Tabs or sidebars?
With iPadOS 18, Apple has introduced a new interface convention for iPad apps to use. It’s a new floating tab bar that appears at the top of the screen, replacing the longstanding convention of having individual tab buttons at the bottom of many apps. Depending on the app, the tab bar can also include a sidebar icon that hides the tabs and instead displays a sidebar. In the Music app, for example, users can add views and even playlists directly to the tab bar, and those items appear in the bar when the sidebar is minimized.
I’m not convinced that this idea is fully baked. It feels like Apple is introducing a new iPad app interface style, but it’s not really done so they’re not getting rid of the old style. A few Apple apps have the new style, but others don’t. The TV and Photos apps remain old school — there’s a sidebar you can hide or show — while Music has the collapsible sidebar tab accompaniment.
The tab bar being customizable is fun, but it fills up really fast, especially if you’re using a language with lots of long words.
As someone who uses the largest iPad Pro primarily in a horizontal orientation, I’m also not a fan of approaches that seem—as this one does—to prefer that sidebars disappear “to make more room for content.” Some content — most notably textual content — does not need to be any wider on an iPad held horizontally. The sidebar serves a useful secondary purpose as a frame that reduces the width of the content area in some apps. (I dislike apps that will only display the sidebar as a temporary item that floats over content, for related reasons.)
I’m also not convinced that moving items that used to be tappable at the bottom of the screen up to the top is actually better. Don’t most people hold their iPads in their hands or maybe prop the bottom of the iPad up on their chest or knees or legs? I sure do. Less movement is required to tap at the bottom of the screen than the top. Also, reaching to the top of the screen causes my arm to cover all that precious content Apple’s making space for. Over-relying on top tabs on an iPad interface doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
And if you do like top tabs, you’ll start looking at all the other sidebars in iPadOS with a little bit of suspicion. Why can’t I pin my three most used mailboxes in Mail in a top tab, so I don’t need to keep the sidebar open there? Well, because it’s using the old sidebar style and Apple doesn’t think these tabs are fit for that app, I guess? It’s a sidebar, but not the right kind of sidebar. (Photos also has a “classic” sidebar, and I’m glad it does, since it’s a pretty good way of navigating that’s not offered on iOS.)
I’m also a bit disappointed that Apple didn’t use this opportunity to make iPad tabs more functional. Not only do they lack glyphs, but they also lack any sort of hierarchical option—think tap-and-hold to drop down additional functionality—that might make them serve more like an iPad equivalent of the Mac menu bar. Instead, they’re just dumb tabs that swap between content views. Again… that’s fine, I guess, but this is the big iPad interface addition Apple chose to roll out for iPads? It’s a strange decision.
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