iPhone users praise Apple for finally adding much-needed feature to calculator app
Calculations just got a whole lot easier
Apple have added one of the most requested features in the latest iPhone update, but it might not be in an area you'd typically expect.
Apple's new iOS 18 update for iPhone hasn't exactly gone down well, with many complaining about new redesigns and even major faults that make them desperate to revert to previous versions.
Sometimes cool new features can slip through the cracks that you won't want to miss out on though, and you'll even find that they're often in the most unlikely places too.
Your iPhone's calculator is seemingly one of the simplest but most essential components of your phone, and the bane of any Math teacher who told you that you wouldn't always have a calculator on you when you were younger.
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What has left many users frustrated over the years though is the lack of a backspace button, making mistakes a seemingly costly thing to deal with, but your worries might just have been cleared.
At the top left of the calculator app now sits the much-requested backspace, letting you freely remove numbers to your heart's content - clearly Apple needed the power of the latest iPhones to implement this demanding feature.
The social media reception has been somewhat mixed though, with people split between welcoming the change, being frustrated that the 'old method' is now removed, and confused that there was indeed an 'old method' in the first place.
As always Reddit is the best microcosm of these reactions, and a post on the r/iphone subreddit distills it perfectly.
"After getting the habit of swiping to remove digits, this is kind of irritating," says one user, while another remarks that "TIL you could swipe to remove digits on calculator..."
One user on X (formerly Twitter) has the opposite opinion though: "I'm eternally grateful for whoever introduced the scientific calculator WITH A BACKSPACE BUTTON so I'm no long playing a memory game whenever I do a quick calcy lation."
This new feature - and especially how it has been implemented - has brought up a wider conversation surrounding Apple's 'confusing' and 'hidden' features.
"[Apple's] software used to be simple and intuitive enough that it didn't need tutorials or guides," argues one commenter, "but even though it's become less and less intuitive, they still don't ever tell people how to use it lol."
It goes to show that this might be a problem that many iPhone users have gone years without realizing that swipes functioned as a backspace in the calculator, and there are so many more hidden features that you don't even realize you could be taking advantage of on a daily basis.