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People stunned after realizing they’ve been using the iPhone calculator app wrong all this time

Home> Apple> iPhone

Published 12:00 1 May 2024 GMT+1

People stunned after realizing they’ve been using the iPhone calculator app wrong all this time

The simple-looking app holds some surprising secrets.

Prudence Wade

Prudence Wade

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Featured Image Credit: DeFodi Images News / Contributor / Natalia Gdovskaia / Getty
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Every so often you see a video that only takes a few seconds to blow your mind.

That's what some people have experienced recently after news started to spread of a little feature in Apple's iPhone Calculator app that very few seem to know about.

When you're typing out a number in Calculator and you mistype a digit, it can be tempting to hit the 'C' button to start over, but that's not the quickest or most efficient way.

It turns out you can simply swipe in either direction over the numbers you've typed so far, deleting the most recently-typed character. This lets you shorten the number, one digit at a time, so that you can retype it correctly.

It's one of those features that you probably wouldn't really know about unless someone told you, even though Apple actually has a support video on YouTube showing exactly how it works.

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Unsurprisingly, the comments under that video are absolutely full of people who can't believe this hidden trick.

One person wrote: "All this time, I didn’t know this", while another was stronger in their amazement: "This is probably one of the most useful YouTube recommendations I’ve seen".

While this is a nice little tip that could save you some valuable seconds at some point, it pales in comparison to another technique that you may have never realized - turning your phone sideways.

So long as you have auto-rotation enabled on your iPhone, turning it on its side while you're in the Calculator app will turn it from a simple handheld calculator into a full scientific one.

Apple won't release a calculator on the iPad until it's exceptional / DeFodi Images News / Contributor
Apple won't release a calculator on the iPad until it's exceptional / DeFodi Images News / Contributor

This means a huge range of new functions are available, including square root, sin, cos and tan calculations, and much more that you may vaguely remember from high school math classes.

As if that wasn't enough, even this list of calculation choices isn't complete - there's a button in the far left column that reads '2nd', and tapping this with reveal even more options.

So, while many math courses will still insist on a real, physical calculator with graphing capabilities and more, if you're caught in a pinch and need to run some numbers, your iPhone can do a sterling job using this app.

This all comes against the backdrop of some massive Calculator news for Apple fans - it's been widely reported that the next version of iPadOS could finally add a native Calculator app for iPad users.

This has been something that people have waited years for, since it's inexplicably been absent for ages, after Steve Jobs reportedly vetoed an early prototype version before the first iPad launched.

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