Transcription
Readers have been emailing me for years about how typing on an iPhone is driving them bonkers. And over the past year or so, I've gotten even more complaints about Apple's autocorrect. People are fed up.
"Is it just me or is it basically impossible to type on the iPhone?" "Now, I cannot be making this many typos, bro."
It turns out it wasn't all in our heads. There was actually a keyboard flaw where when you typed a character, it wouldn't insert into the compose window, and those missing characters made autocorrect worse at its job. This is an iPhone running the software with the bug. And I'm going to type a message as fast as I absolutely can so we can see how autocorrect works on this phone.
Okay, we obviously sped that up. Even I can't type that fast. But if we look at the recording and slow it down, you can see what I'm trying to type. I was thinking we could. I press C, then O. But no O shows up. Then it registers the next key, I. Then when we look at the final text message, there are some typos.
Apple is finally acknowledging the problem with a fix in the latest iPhone software update, iOS 26.4, which you can download now. So, let's try that test again with another iPhone with the new software installed.
With the new software update, there was only one typo, and the other words were preserved. Overall, the update is better. It doesn't fix every problem with autocorrect, though. An Apple spokeswoman said that autocorrect still runs on the same machine learning models as iOS 18, which came out in 2024. That model is supposed to learn from how you personally type over time, but it's not perfect. On my phone, the San Francisco fog becomes San Francisco dog. This update won't fix those kinds of issues. So, iPhone users will probably continue to gripe until the software catches up to our thumbs.