What the fuck, man. What the fuck. I’m sorry to get all sweary about calculators this early in the morning (7.40am), but it turns out you’ve been able to backspace on an iPhone calculator this WHOLE TIME, and I never knew. Perhaps neither did you, and that’s why you’ve clicked on this article. Or perhaps you’re about to yell at me in the comments about how “everyone knows this, you idiots”, in which case… good for you. I hope you choke on your coffee.
One of the most annoying things about the iPhone calculator is that it comes with no backspace button. If you make a mistake, then you have no choice but to clear your calculation and start again. OR SO I THOUGHT.
As it turns out, you can just swipe right on the numbers, and it serves as a backspace function. Journalist and prolific tweeter Yashar Ali posted about the iPhone calculator trick this morning, and it popped off. Guess there’s a lot of people who didn’t know about this VERY WELL HIDDEN feature. Way to make us all look like idiots, Apple.
I was today years old when I learned that if you make a mistake in your iPhone calculator you don’t need to delete the whole number, you can just swipe right on it. pic.twitter.com/Psy5O5FPHR
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 24, 2020
Ali also pointed out that if you turn your phone sideways, it turns into a scientific calculator – the type you can use for trigonometry and calculus, if you still remember how to do it (I don’t).
2. Another thing I learned today….I’ve always complained about the limit on the iPhone calculator with respect to numbers. You can flip your phone into landscape mode and it expands the number limit. pic.twitter.com/N9jePw3UoA
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 24, 2020
Why is this not intuitive? Why did no one ever explain this to me? Why does your iPhone not tell you what’s going on here when you first open up the calculator app? Apple, I have questions.
I did a bit of Googling, and the last time stories about the ‘iPhone calculator’s hidden backspace trick’ were published, it was 2017. Clearly we all have a short attention span, and I look forward to reading about the backspace trick again in 2023.
Or: Apple could just ADD a backspace button in. That would also be good.
