I really dislike the new Calculator app in MacOS 15 Sequoia! Can anyone provide a download link for getting the older better Calculator from, say, Sonoma for Apple Silicon? I’d love to see if it will run on my new machine.
Background: I just bought a new MacBook Air M4 running MacOS 15 Sequoia, finally upgrading from my wonderful mid-2015 MacBook Pro running MacOS 12 Monterey (Intel). The new MacBook Air has Sequoia, and Sequoia has the new “improved” Calculator app, which I find completely annoying. I want all the conversions in the pulldown menubar menu that the old Calculator app has! So fast! So easy! I use it almost every day, multiple times per day. It’s totally missing in the new app. (And so is the paper tape.) Ugh.
• I tried copying the Calculator app from my Intel MacBook Pro, but it won’t run on the new MacBook Air. When I try, it says, ‘The application “Calculator.app” can’t be opened.’
• I downloaded the Sonoma installer, but there isn’t any easy way to extract just the Calculator app. And of course, it won’t do any installation of any kind on my new machine.
Anyone have a link to the older calculator? Please?
While you can extract the app from the Sonoma installer using Pacifist, it won’t run on Sequoia.
The only thing I can think of is to run a Sonoma virtual machine using UTM.
Since you have an M4, there is no issue with speed as I use UTM on an M1 Air. It’s easy to create the VM but you do need to download the IPSW recovery file for Sonoma as the regular installer does not work for creating the VM. The Mr. Macintosh site has those:
It may not feel the same as before since you would be switching between windows when needing to access the app but if it’s important to you, then this is one solution.
The functionality is still there, but you don’t like the interface, right?
They did change how you access conversions (via a button on the calculator and a menu). Live calculations are in the main view; you can access the history via a sidebar (View>History).
I agree with others that getting an older version of Calculator.app to run on Sequoia won’t be practical, and running an older version of macOS in a virtual machine just for the calculator feels like overkill to me.
As @chirano suggested, there are alternative calculator apps that may meet your needs. Personally, I like PCalc. The image below shows PCalc 4.10.8’s conversion menu. It’s a top level menu in PCalc, so it is very easily accessed.
Thanks for the good thoughts, and confirmation that older versions of the stock app won’t run under Sequoia. Dang. I guess I’ll try using the new dis-improved stock app for a while, and if it’s a thumbs-down for my usage, I’ll give PCalc a try. Thanks again.
Another option, if you have an iPhone and keep it close to you when you’re using your Mac, is the iOS Calculator app. Conversions remain at most one tap away from the main Calculator screen, with the ability to keep a favorite conversion always visible.
The new functionality is enabled by a menu bar item (View > Convert) or a similar menu found by pressing the “calculator” icon in the lower left. That opens up a dual display pane on the calculator with pull-down options on each pane that sets the desired conversion type for both panes and the units for the particular pane. In this example. I’m doing a Data conversion with the top panel in GiB (power of 2) and the bottom panel in GB (power of 10).
The highlighted panel is the one accepting the input, the other panel gives you the converstion. Want to do the reverse conversion? Click in the other display panel and the original one now becomes the converted value of whatever your calculations provide.
Use the drop-downs in each panel to change the units of the conversion, or the type of conversion (e.g. data, area, currency).
PCalc is also highly customisable, so you can set up a calculator layout that has your chosen conversions directly on buttons. In fact you could create a calculator layout that is all conversions. Or you can simply include a button to call up a conversions dialogue (the A > B button):
