Last week, it was discovered that iOS 11 has an error in its calculator app that creates in the wrong answer if you add multiple numbers together quickly. For anyone purchasing an $1,000 iPhone X in the next few weeks: You might not be able to type or calculate things, but at least you can open it with your face.
A portion of iPhone owners using Apple’s latest iOS 11 mobile software have inexplicably lost the ability to type the capital letter “i” from their keyboards.
Instead, the phone’s built-in keyboard will display an exclamation point and a question mark in a box, or a capital letter “a” and a series of lines. The problem appears to stem from how the keyboard’s predictive-text function reads the capital letter “i”, according to the Guardian.
Even if your phone can type the letter “i”, you’ll likely still see the garbled messaging if it’s been sent from a device that has been affected.
It’s the default suggestion every time I️ go to reply to a tweet, it’s absurd lol
– Michael Ellis (@Michael_Ellis__) November 6, 2017
How to fix it
For now, the simplest solution is to install a third-party keyboard, like Google’s Gboard. Apple is suggesting that users set up a short-cut replacement for the letter, so that any time a capital “i” is typed, it’ll display a lower-case “i”, instead of nonsense. Apple wasn’t immediately available to comment on when it was going to fix the problem.
It might be something worth fixing pretty sharpishly, given that the letter “i” is a rather useful one in most languages, and it’s the first letter in the name of the device it’s stopped working on. Only the computer industry, with its “always in beta” mantra, would sell a $1,000 product that can’t calculate or write accurately.
