I was pretty delighted to realize I could now delete the lame Calculator.app from my iPhone and replace it with something of my choice. For now I've settled on NumWorks, which is apparently an emulator of a modern upstart physical graphing calc that has made some inroads into schools. And of course, you can make a Control Center button to launch an app, so that's what I did.
Honestly, the main beef I have with Calculator.app is that on a screen this big, I ought to be able to see several previous calculations and scroll up if needed. I don't want an exact replica of a 1990s 4-function calculator like the default is (ok, it has more digits and the ability to paste, but besides that, adds almost nothing).
My personal favorite is iHP48 (previously I used m48+ before it died) running an HP 48GX with metakernal installed as I used through college. Still just so intuitive and fast to me.
I found the article hard to read. I turned on reader mode. I still found it hard to read. Each sentence is very short. My organic CPU spins trying to figure out how each sentence connects to the next. Each sentence feels more like a paragraph, or a tweet, instead of having a flow. I think that's my issue with it.
I severely doubt your thesis around iPhones being Veblen goods.
You are claiming that if the price of the iPhone went down, apple would sell fewer phones?
Correspondingly, you are arguing that if they increased prices they could increase sales?
You are claiming that 100s of millions of people have all made the decision that the price of an iPhone is more than it is worth to them as a device, but is made up for by being seen with one in your hand?
Not all goods that signify status are Veblen goods.
Can you prove that is still the case with the iPhone SE by showing a comparable hardware with similar long support on software updates and lower price?
> Its a demonstration of wealth. This is called Veblen good
Just the other day I was reminded of the poor little "I am rich" iOS app (a thousand dollar ruby icon that performed diddly squat by design), which Apple deep-sixed from the app store PDQ.
Methodology is one thing; I can't really agree that deploying an LLM to do sums is great. Almost as hilarious as asking "What's moon plus sun?"
But phenomenon is another thing. Apple's numerical APIs are producing inconsistent results on a minority of devices. This is something worth Apple's attention.
I'd think other neural-engine using apps would also have weird behavior. Would've been interesting to try a few App Store apps and see the weird behavior
Good article. Would have liked to see them create a minimal test case, to conclusively show that the results of math operations are actually incorrect.
Interesting post, but the last bit of logic pointing to the Neural Engine for MLX doesn’t hold up. MLX supports running on CPU, Apple GPU via Metal, and NVIDIA GPU via CUDA: https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/tree/main/mlx/backend
neural nets or AI are very bad at math, it can only produce what's in the training data. So if you have trained it from 1+1 to 8+8 it can't do 9+9, it's not like a child brain that it can make logical conclusions.
> Update on Feb. 1st:
> Well, now it's Feb. 1st and I have an iPhone 17 Pro Max to test with and... everything works as expected. So it's pretty safe to say that THAT specific instance of iPhone 16 Pro Max was hardware-defective.
50 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] threadDid you file a radar? (silently laughing while writing this, but maybe there's someone left at Apple who reads those)
The best way to do math on my phone I know of is the HP Prime emulator.
Honestly, the main beef I have with Calculator.app is that on a screen this big, I ought to be able to see several previous calculations and scroll up if needed. I don't want an exact replica of a 1990s 4-function calculator like the default is (ok, it has more digits and the ability to paste, but besides that, adds almost nothing).
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/graphncalc83/id744882019
https://pcalc.com/mac/thirty.html
My other favorite calculator is free42, or its larger display version plus42
https://thomasokken.com/plus42/
For a CAS tool on a pocket mobile device, I haven't found anything better than MathStudio (formerly SpaceTime):
https://mathstud.io
You can run that in your web browser, but they maintain a mobile app version. It's like a self-hosted Wolfram Alpha.
But it's still surprising that that LLM doesn't work on iPhone 16 at all. After all LLMs are known for their tolerance to quantization.
You are claiming that if the price of the iPhone went down, apple would sell fewer phones?
Correspondingly, you are arguing that if they increased prices they could increase sales?
You are claiming that 100s of millions of people have all made the decision that the price of an iPhone is more than it is worth to them as a device, but is made up for by being seen with one in your hand?
Not all goods that signify status are Veblen goods.
Just the other day I was reminded of the poor little "I am rich" iOS app (a thousand dollar ruby icon that performed diddly squat by design), which Apple deep-sixed from the app store PDQ.
If misery loves company, Veblen goods sure don't.
But phenomenon is another thing. Apple's numerical APIs are producing inconsistent results on a minority of devices. This is something worth Apple's attention.
At least the machine didn't say it was seven!
nothing to see here.