Graphing Calculator and Grapher

Tucked away in /Applications/Utilities there’s an app seldom used, Grapher, that has one of the weirdest histories of any software in macOS.

Grapher is a relative newcomer to replace its predecessor Graphing Calculator, the first fully native app to run on PowerPC processors. As Graphing Calculator was developed free for Apple, and was the killer app that demonstrated how much faster PowerPCs were than Motorola 68K processors, you might wonder why we now have Grapher instead.

Graphing Calculator was originally developed by Ron Avitzur and Greg Robbins, who were at the time former contractors whose work for Apple had been terminated when their project was cancelled. Despite being unpaid and living frugally, the pair developed their app largely in secret, at the time when Apple was getting the first prototype PowerPC Macs working. It turned out to be the first stunning demonstration of Apple’s new hardware, and was released as part of System 7.5 on 12 September 1994. Ron Avitzur has given a riveting account of their work in a talk, and on his website.

You can download the latest version of this 30 year-old app free from the App Store. This now uses SwiftUI, requires Sonoma, and runs native on both Intel and Apple silicon Macs.

When Apple released Mac OS X, it shipped without Graphing Calculator, presumably because of that app’s origins on the Mac rather than in NeXTSTEP. Instead of adopting Graphing Calculator, in 2004 Apple bought Curvus Pro X from Arizona Software and turned that into Grapher, which was released as part of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005, under the name Grapher, which continues as a bundled app in Sonoma 19 years later.

Purists who used Graphing Calculator insist that Grapher isn’t a patch on the original. You only have to watch Graphing Calculator’s Full Demo for a few minutes, download Today’s Equations, or browse its User’s Gallery to see the differences. While Grapher is thoroughly competent, it’s lacklustre beside the original Graphing Calculator. Whatever made Apple turn its back on all that, and buy in an app that pales by comparison?