Bug stops some iPhone users typing "I" – replacing it with a symbol

Glitch in predictive text system making messages illegible for some iPhone, iPad and Mac users, while Apple Watch bug crashes when asking for the weather

A bizarre predictive text error has left some iPhone users unable to type the word "I". Instead, every time they attempt to use the English first-person pronoun, it gets replaced by the letter A and an unprintable unicode character, typically rendered as a question mark in a box, but occasionally five horizontal bars instead.

The error first surfaced almost a week ago, as scattered reports of the problem hit social media and the specialist press. It appears to affect users of iOS 10 and iOS 11, and has also been reported as happening to users of Apple's Mac computers too.