10 Hidden Features Of the iPhone Calculator App

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten hidden features of your iPhone's Calculator App.

When you first look at the iPhone's Calculator App it seems pretty basic. But there is actually a ton of hidden functionality if you know where to look. Keep in mind a lot of things I'm going to show you are part of iOS 18 and weren't available in previous versions of the Calculator App. So make sure you are using the latest.

Here you can see in the basic Calculator App even things like Memory Buttons seem to be missing from this. Those are available even on simple cheap physical calculators.  But all that and more is there and many additional things. For instance, let's start with something simple. If you are typing a mathematical equation like this and then you decide that you want to delete the last thing that you typed notice how the button at the upper left is Delete. You can delete the last one you typed and keep deleting like that. Now it seems like you have to tap that a bunch of times to clear everything out but in fact all you need to do is tap and Hold and then it acts as a Clear Button. 

Now let's say you've done a bunch of calculations, like these. You want to go back and look at your History. Well, you can do that. Your Calculator App automatically keeps a history. It's right here under this button. Click there and you'll see a history of all your past calculations. You can scroll up to go even further back and you can Restore a calculation by simply tapping on it like that. You can see it comes back. You'll see the original equation that you typed there and the answer there at the bottom. In fact you can continue to work here by adding more, like that. 

Now if you're missing a memory function here note that you can use Copy & Paste for the same thing. So, for instance, I can do a calculation like this and then I can Tap & Hold here and select Copy. Now I can do a different calculation, like that, and instead of typing or remembering the previous answer I can Tap & Hold and Paste. Then, I can use Copy & Paste as memory. I can also, of course, go to History here and I can Tap & Hold one of these and copy the expression or copy the result. 

Note you can also Copy from any other App. It can even be a complex equation like this one here that has parentheses in it. So I can Copy this one here and then I can go into the Calculator App and I can Paste that in and get the result. 

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Now what about all those missing functions that would make the Calculator App so much more advanced. Well, they're there. If you tap the bottom button here and you switch from Basic to Scientific then you'll get all these functions you normally see on a scientific calculator. You even get a second level for some of the buttons by tapping there. You've also got the Memory buttons you might see on a lot of normal calculators; Memory Clear, Adds Memory, Subtracts from Memory, and Memory Recall. You've got the regular buttons here and you can just go into Scientific Mode if all you really want to do is use these Memory Buttons or just one particular thing. You don't need any special skills to use the basic math things that are in the scientific calculator. They work the same as on the basic calculator. But also note that you can switch between them very easily. So, for instance, if you wanted to figure out the cosign of .2, like that, if I were to switch right now back to the basic calculator it stills sees that there. The basic calculator has the functionality, just not the buttons. So I can tap equals here to get the result. 

Switching back and forth between basic and scientific is the key to using the Calculator App effectively.  

Another thing you'll notice here in the Scientific Calculator is Parentheses. So you can use parentheses to do more complex calculations. Like let's do 5 X then left parenthesis (3+4) and then right parenthesis like that. I can calculate the result there. Like I showed you before you don't have to stay in Scientific Mode all the time. So if you wanted to use parentheses in Basic Mode you can do something just like that. So you can say 8 X and now you want left parenthesis. So switch just temporarily to the Scientific Calculator to access that button. Then switch back to the Basic Calculator and you can then use the regular buttons here. The right parenthesis is applied so you can now use equal and you've used parentheses even though most of the time that was in Basic Calculator Mode. 

Another thing you'll see here when you tap this button is not only can you switch between Basic and Scientific but you can toggle on a Convert Mode. If you toggle that On then you actually have two answer fields here at the top. There's one that's white and one that's gray. Each of those will have a unit applied to it. In this case meters and feet. So whatever I type here, if I do 2+3, you can see 2+3 meters equals 16.4 feet. You can swap which one is where, like that. You can also tap here and get a list of all the different things that you can convert to. So you can see all these different kinds of units here. For instance, let's switch to Temperature. Let's say Fahrenheit and it automatically chooses Celsius but you can tap here and say you want Kelvin instead. So you can convert between different units as you calculate. You, of course, don't need to calculate if you know the value already. You can just type it like that and just see the result. 

Also note there is one very special type of unit that is very useful. It's all the way over here under Currency. Currency not only converts but is going to use daily data. So it is going to get the daily conversion rates. You can search right here, because it is a pretty long list. So let's convert US dollar and it is automatically going to choose something I used last, which let's say was Japanese Yen. But you can tap here and say I want Euro instead and I get my conversion there. I just type a number like that and I see the conversion or I do a calculation like that and see the result there. 

Now there are a ton of other hidden features. If you switch, not to Basic or Scientific Mode, but to Math Notes. Math Notes actually allows you to create these little documents. They are notes just like in the Notes App but these particular notes can be accessed in both Calculator and Notes. If you tap here at the bottom right now you're typing a new Math Note. You can actually type here. So I can type an equation like this and it is going to produce a result like that. I can keep typing to have more. So let's do like minus 2, like that, and I can tap Return and then Return again and I'm on a new line. So you can have a bunch of different equations here typed out and Saved in this individual little note that you can bring back and edit later. The calculations are done automatically for you as you finish the different expressions. 

But the real power of Math Notes is hidden behind this button here. If you tap that now you're drawing. If you're on an iPad you would use an Apple Pencil. But since we're on an iPhone you just use your finger. You can actually draw with your finger numbers and it will give you a result. So I'm going to very carefully draw here and put something like this. Now I'm going to draw the equals symbol there and it is going to automatically calculate the result. You can get a lot more complex than this as well. So I can do something like this. I'm going to multiply but I'm going to do it with standard notation here so I'm not even going to include a multiplication symbol and then I'm going to do this, like that, and it will give me the result. But let's go a step further. I'm going to tap on this number here and when I do this little control appears at the top and I can drag it to change the value of the individual number like that and then you get a result here that updates automatically. Even if you knew all that here's something you might not have known. You can write things like this, one number on top of another number, on top of another number, and watch what happens if I just draw a line. It will add them all together. Or I can have it multiply them all together. Now I can still tap on this and change this value like that. 

Now the Calculator App can also do some types of Graphs. You can do this by first writing out the equation. You can type it out or I'm just going to write it here. It's important that you put it in the format of Y = and then something that includes an X. When I do that nothing happens at first. If you tap equals here it will show you what it thinks the equation is so you can check to make sure it interpreted your handwriting correctly. Then you can choose Insert Graph. Now it puts this little graph here, like this. You can stretch it, move it around, with two fingers you can pinch in or drag up with two fingers like that. You can see this graph. You can even then go and change this, like that, adjusting the values here. 

So one more thing that Math Notes can get you is the ability to use some Variables. So instead of drawing I'm actually going to type this time. The first line of a note is usually a title here. Below that I'll start with my math. I'm just going to do A and then I'm going to use the equals symbol to assign a value to that variable. So let's do 6 and then let's do B and then let's do 4 and return. Then I'm going to calculate things based on those variables. So I'll do A plus B and you can see it calculates the result. I'll do Return and then Return again and I'm going to do A and this time I'm going to use the asterisk for multiplication and then I'm going to do B and you can see it does multiplication there. Now the thing about variables is that everything updates automatically. So if I go back here and I remove this value and give it another value, like this, then you can see the equations update. It will update no matter what I type there. Even if I do another math equation as part of that, like that. 

So there is a look at some of the things you can do in the Calculator App starting with iOS 18 that aren't easy to find. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.