Does 'undo send' make e-life even harder?

I usually don’t get excited about iPhone updates, but iOS 16 might be the exception.

The new operating system allows users to do two things that are really awesome, he said in his most breathless voice. One might even be life-changing. That is, if your life doesn’t involve skydiving naked from an aero plane or a lady with a body from outer space, as Vince Neil sings.

First things first − the cool, non-life-changing update. If you hold down your finger on a dominant figure in one of your photos, Apple’s new operating system automatically removes the background.

I tried it first with a photo of my dog. Boom! The camera fairies traced him with a white line that looked a little like a firecracker fuse. When I opened social media, I could paste just his image, minus the half-dozen Wilson tennis balls he’d strewn around the floor and the mountain of unread books on my nightstand.

Don’t write to me saying that Android phones have been doing this since Obama was president or that some 99-cent app does it better. One, I’m an unrepentant Apple snob, and two, I like the convenience of having nothing to install and just holding down my finger.

Now for the life-changing … uh, change. The new iOS gives you the option to edit or even delete a sent text message. Ever send a break-up text to the wrong significant other? Or had a glaring typo in a text to your boss that changed “oh fudge” to the word that got little Ralphie’s mouth washed out with Lifebuoy soap in “A Christmas Story”?

No? Me either, but I needed something dramatic to convey how indefatigably cool it is to be able to “edit” or “undo send.”

Because maybe at some point in your life you’ve been having two simultaneous text conversations, one with a colleague and one with your spouse, and accidentally told your colleague you loved him and your spouse that a Thursday morning meeting would be terrific.

Not an apocalyptic mistake, but still.

But here comes the small print − and as always, the devil is in the details. You can only truly edit messages to other people who are using the same iOS 16 operating system. If they have an earlier version or an Android phone, they’ll just get a new message with the edited text, so your gaffe or inelegant wording (“I think your boyfriend is a schmuck”) remains.

Even if you’re chatting with people using the new software, they can still press down on the edited message and see the original, so the “schmuck” message is just a fingertip away.

Which raises ethical, Pandora Box-y type questions. If I see an edited message, will I press down on it and see what the person said originally? Or do I respect their revision process and stick with the second draft?

You gotta know I’m pressing down on that edited message. Every. Single. Time. If you aren’t, then what’s wrong with you? (Editor: please edit that last sentence to read, “If you aren’t, then you are a far better person than I am.” Thank you.)

Better to use the “undo send” feature, which blows up the message on the screen with a little puff of blue, much like Wile E. Coyote hitting the desert floor after falling off a cliff.

Even there (the deleted text, not the desert floor), a few caveats remain. “Undo send” works for only two minutes after a message is sent.

And if the receiver has even one Apple device, like an older iPad, that still uses an earlier operating system, the message remains, even if it’s deleted from other devices.

I’m waiting for some wit to come up with a name for the daredevil practice of sending a scandalous text and then trying to delete it before the receiver reads it. Destined to become the next TikTok challenge, it could be called e-sendiary.

These changes may prompt iPhone users to have frank conversations among themselves. Have you updated yet? Will you peek at edited messages? How quickly do you generally check texts?

Plus the angst of wondering if your poker-faced friends read your rant about their lack of parenting skills after their little darling doodled with a Sharpie on your living room walls, or if you deleted it in time.

On second thought, maybe this second new feature isn’t life-changing and indefatigably cool. It’s more like a pencil with an eraser that still lets people see what’s been erased.

But hey, at least I can still drop out the backgrounds on my dog photos.