How the Apple Watch could rescue your next restaurant bill

How the Apple Watch could rescue your next restaurant bill

Little-known tool inside Apple Watch helps patrons calculate fair tips and keep friends honest with splitting the tab

by Irene Park

Though many features of the Apple Watch have already been shared since it first launched, here’s an extra tip that might help with every time you dine out.

Most diners will agree that one of the most stressful parts of dining out, especially in larger groups, is figuring out the proper tip and splitting the bill fairly at the end of a meal. Your Apple Watch, however, can easily and discreetly turn you into an impartial hero right at the dinner table.

 

 

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How to calculate tips on an Apple Watch

A friend’s grandmother coined a phrase I often employ when around a moment when others get stingy when the bill hits the restaurant table, “Cheap is not sexy.”  While tipping etiquette has been hotly debated over the past few years, using the Apple Watch to calculate a tip will ease the process regardless of your tipping philosophy.

Apple Watch with tip button in calculator app highlighted in red

Credit: Apple

 

For an Apple Watch running watchOS 10:

  • Open the calculator app on your Apple Watch.
  • Enter the total amount of the bill before the tip. As an example, let’s say it’s $40.00.
  • Press the ‘Tip’ button, and it will automatically calculate a 20% tip, which is $8.00 dollars in this case.
  • Don’t feel like tipping 20%. Want to tip more or less? You can adjust the tip percentage from 1-100% by simply turning the digital crown to the desired percentage.
  • You will both get the amount you want to tip and the bill total, including the tip, which in this example is $48.00, so you can easily jot it down on your receipt.

MORE: IS TECHNOLOGY MAKING YOU OVERTIP?

 

How to calculate the tip & split the bill on an Apple Watch?

If the stress of figuring out the tip at the end of the meal isn’t enough, there is another layer of stress if you then need to split the bill. With an Apple Watch, however, you can both calculate the tip and split the bill evenly with ease.

For an Apple Watch running watchOS 10:

  • Open the calculator app on your Apple Watch.
  • Enter the total amount of the bill before the tip. As an example, let’s say it’s $125.43.
  • Press the ‘Tip’ button, and it will automatically calculate a 20% tip. In this case, this tip is $25.09.
  • If you want to adjust the default 20% tip you can adjust the percentage from 1-100% by simply turning the digital crown to the desired percentage.
  • Press ‘People’ and use the digital crown to adjust the number of people you need to split the bill equally with. In this case, let’s say it’s 4 people.
  • Directly under the total amount of the bill, (in smaller font), it will give you the amount each person should pay. So, in this example, each person would pay $37.63 each.

While not available in all regions, and no one can guarantee that your dining partners will want to split the bill evenly, this trick on the Apple Watch can keep the process faster and easier. 

MORE: APPLE WATCH SERIES 9 VS. ULTRA 2: WHICH ONE SHOULD YOU BUY?

 

 

Kurt’s key takeaways

The Apple Watch continues to provide new, and easy ways to handle life’s most important as well as sometimes stressful tasks. With a couple of taps, you can easily calculate the tip and split a bill discreetly.

How do you decide how much to tip when you dine out? Do you follow a standard percentage, or do you adjust it based on the service or other factors? Let us know in the comments below.


   

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