Apparently the iOS calculator has had a scientific mode since 2008

Today, I learned that the iPhone’s built-in calculator app has a scientific mode – and all you have to do to access it is put your phone to the side. If you’re the kind of person who keeps your phone permanently locked in portrait mode (like me), this might surprise you, as many of us here at The edge.

This unlocks all kinds of features, like adding numbers to memory, parentheses, exponents, and all those trigonometric functions back in high school. The feature isn’t exactly new or hidden away – it was introduced in iOS 2.0 in 2008, and there’s even a screenshot of it on the App Store page for the calculator app.

To be fair, most people probably never see this App Store page because the app comes preinstalled on every phone. It’s not the first app you’d probably look for if you wanted to install a new calculator either – even with the hidden (ish) feature, it’s still not great.

For starters, there is no magnetic stripe feature, which lets you see all the operations you just did, which is useful when you need to see if you’ve already added a value or not. It also makes some essential functions like parentheses – which I use in almost every math equation I do – difficult to access.

Fortunately, there are other options: PCalc offers a more robust computing experience and offers a free version of PCalc Lite which is also worth downloading. Or for more serious math, there’s the TI-30XS, which can make some things (like fractions) so easy it almost feels like you’re cheating.