It's time for episode 604 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, May 7th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where our summer playlist starts with the Mac startup chime. I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, and I'm joined across the internet by my dear friend, my good pal, Jeopardy Mastermind. It's Dan Morin. How you doing, Dan? I'm doing well. I was going to do the start of time, but you beat me to it.
It's hard to do. It is, yeah. I'm only kind of remembering it as well because I don't really have to start my Mac up too often. Mine's usually muted too, so I don't hear it as much. Who knows? Who knows? While we think about it, let's go ahead and introduce our awesome guest. To my left? Yeah, the math has been done. host of the longest-running Apple-centric podcast celebrating 20 years on May 13th. Holy cow. It's Allison Podfeet Sheridan. Hello, Allison.
Hello, Micah. I am just a little bit excited about that. That's amazing. Also amazing is to my left this week, a YouTuber for, I assume, also 20 years, right? YouTube's been around that long now. Christopher Lawley. Welcome back, Chris. Thank you for having me. Excited to be back. Not quite 20 years. It'll be 10 years next year. Oh, that's pretty good. Not quite 10 years. But congratulations to Allison. 20 years. That's pretty impressive.
It's a long time. Thank you, thank you. Very, very cool. Well, you know how this works. We've not been around for that long, but we do know by this point how this works. We have 30 minutes, four topics, and mine for you is this. The Kindle app now lets you make purchases directly from Amazon. I just want to know how everybody's feeling about the recent Epic versus Apple ruling and the potential change or opportunity for change for many an app.
in the U.S. Allison, we'll start with you. Well, this is going to be a controversial opinion, but I'm not one of the people who are rabidly against Apple about this, so I'm not like, whoa, this is amazing! And I've always been kind of annoyed that all of the conversations about it always talk about 30% when 90% of the devs pay 15%. But anyway, I do appreciate that it'll take away the friction points for Kindle purchases. I don't often buy on my phone, but...
Every time I do it, I'm like, wait, wait, I can't find the button. And I sit there confused until I remember, so that'll be nice. But I don't know, this whole thing of not being able to charge anything, it seems like this is like allowing someone to put a product on the shelves at Costco, but just walk out with it and buy it somewhere else. So Costco pays for the store and the people to stock the shelves, the electricity and everything.
but they don't get anything? That just seems really odd. Now, a third-party app store where I could put Rogue Amoeba software on my iPad and iPhone, that would get me excited. I am 100% in favor of this ruling. I think it was unconscionable for Apple to take 30% of all of those purchases and to not allow any alternative in any way. unless they were dragged into a kicking and screaming. And they had the chance to make a different decision here.
As we saw from this court order, they could have complied with what is a legal order, but they decided not to. And they decided to be extremely disingenuous about it. And I think that was a mistake. I feel like this is not dissimilar. from me, you know, talking to my kid and asking them to do something in a particular way and then be like, well, I sort of did it that way. It's like, well, you didn't really, so now you don't get anything. I'm sorry. It's rough. It is rough, but...
honestly, even that 15% for some of the things they were doing here was too high. And nobody's suggesting that Apple shouldn't get a cut in some way of it. you know, proceeds of people buying apps there and people using their mechanisms. But the extension to which they did it was, frankly, anti-competitive and was ruled by a judge as anti-competitive.
I, for one, am all in favor of seeing Apple have to compete a little more and to work a little harder, and particularly as far as the Kindle books and the other e-readers go. This experience made stuff worse for customers. It just did. I mean, Allison pointed out how difficult she had it, and she has hosted a Mac podcast for 20 years. The average person is probably going to struggle, and when you have to explain to them why they can't just buy stuff in the app...
I challenge you to come up with an answer better than Apple wants more money. That's not a good look for anybody. So I am in favor of this decision. I think Apple should have to contend with it as the new normal and they should have to work harder to retain the customers they have and to treat them better because the relationships they've had with developers over the past decade have been extremely strained in many cases.
We'll see what happens. It's under appeal. But I, for one, feel like this is moving in the right direction. Chris? Yeah, I'm 100% with Dan on this one. I am totally in favor of this. It's kind of weird that there was only one way to buy apps or purchase upgrades within apps.
and like the developers had to go through apple's payment processing and the fact now they can link out to a website uh the web is not this big scary thing it's been around for a while people know how to buy things on the web um I kind of, you know, Apple's been getting a little big for their britches, and I think this is a way they need to kind of get a little smack down a little bit. Because just... So many developers that I've talked to are kind of just like, they're not.
enthused about Apple anymore, whether they're paying the 15 or 30%. 15% is still a lot of money. And the fact that Apple came up with this whole other system that they were, you know, the original ruling was like, nope, you have to be able to link out to the web, but Apple is going to be able to put up like this sheet that said you're going out to the web and they could still take, you know, a certain percentage.
And they decided, oh, let's take 27% because they're like 3% credit card processing. But then somebody said, well, it's actually closer to four. So developers would be losing even more money that way. And plus there would have been more work because developers had to do their own accounting and things like that.
I think it's ridiculous. I'm glad developers are going to be able to offer the Apple solution for people that want the convenience of it, but also, hey, just click this link, go to a website, and you can sign up for something, and developers get... 100% of that. Apple had the opportunity to not completely lose, but this is them. They completely lost. They lost everything here.
It was because they decided to listen to the wrong people. Wow. Very thorough thoughts all around. No crumbs left, really, for me to cover. I will just say, I... Surely for the... excitement and entertainment that is watching people have to own up to the choices they make. This has been something to pay attention to. I do like that now, perhaps when I am going to get another book from Audible, I'm not looking at the price.
because folks, I get more than one book a month, so I have to go past just the credits that I have. And I don't have to look at that price and go, is this a real price? Or if I go to the web, is this going to be a different price that's less expensive? and then do that dance every time. That's not fun. So I'm looking forward to that changing where now I can count on the price being the price being the price. But we'll see how everything else shakes out.
All right. Thank you all for your answer on that. Let us go to our next topic, which comes from Allison. When you run into bugs with software from smaller companies, not like Microsoft or Apple, but just little vendors, do you report them to the developers or do you just suffer in silence?
And if you do write to them, do you send them screenshots or make videos or do you just write whiny little emails? What's your strategy? How dare you describe my emails as whiny? That is accurate. No, I... I know a lot of developers, and I've been talking to developers for decades now.
And so if it's somebody I know personally, I will try to, you know, write them a message and be like, hey, I ran into this. How can I help? What is the easiest way for me to give you information? Is it screenshot, screen recording? Do you need information, diagnostic information from my system? And I think it really depends on the severity of the bug and how much of an impact it has. There are bugs that have been so bad that I have decided, like, I don't want to use this program anymore.
because the risks of it happening, even as I try to report things to be like, look, this is a problem, but I can't use your software now because it is such a problem that is interfering with stuff I need to do. And then there are things where I work around, right? Where it's like, oh, you know, this is a little annoying the way that this is not working right now, but I guess I don't really need that particular feature or I can live sort of using this other workaround.
You know, I'm not always the best at reporting bugs because I think it's time consuming, right? Like we want to do a good job when you do it, but it means doing a lot of work, tracking them down and documenting them and everything. I have many things to do. I'm sorry. I feel bad. I want to help, but I'm busy and I can't always spend an hour tracking down something and providing all the information. But I try to when I have
the time and the opportunity. And it's something where I really feel like, oh, this is something they didn't catch, right? They don't know about this or other people aren't reporting this or whatever. Like that, I think is a big one. I've run into that in the past where it's been like, oh, nobody else seems to be seeing this thing. Let me try and report that thing and see if I can be helpful in some way. So I do my best, but I'm only human. Chris, what about you?
Yeah, like you, Dan, I know a lot of developers. So if I'm using an app that I know that developer personally and I come across a bug, I will shoot them a text message and just be like, hey, I found this thing. Here's a screenshot. Have fun. Like you, I'm busy. I don't have a bunch of time to sit around and troubleshooting software bugs. And then there's been bigger scale things where there have been fairly large apps out there that
I had massive issues with one of them. I wasn't even able to export video for weeks and it ended up costing me my iPhone 13 Pro review. And ask any Apple commentator, you do not want to lose your iPhone review. So that one, like I worked with them for weeks to try and resolve it. And I came to the conclusion of I cannot use this piece of software anymore.
because I don't want to waste my time on this. So I guess there's different levels to it, but definitely for smaller companies, especially indie developers, I will try and just send them a message. If I know them personally, send them a text message. If I don't, I'll just... send him a quick email if like if it's a big bug or something like that and i'll try when i can but i am busy i don't always have time to do it
I was born in Missouri, North Missouri, which means I am a Midwesterner, which means I have Midwestern sensibilities, which means that anything that's going wrong is my fault, not the fault of anybody else. And therefore, I just automatically assume that if something's going wrong with the software, it's something I have done and something that I need to figure out myself.
So it's rare that I end up reporting any bugs because I either figure it out that it actually was something that I could work around or I... you know, go long enough that there's a software update that fixes it. And then I'm like, Oh great. That's, that's fixed. That wasn't me. However, where it doesn't apply and when I do provide lots of feedback and information is if I am beta testing someone's software or if someone has asked me to check this out or whatever.
then I come through with the screenshots and the video and anything else that the person might need to understand what's going on. But yeah, outside of that, I'm saying it's user error, particularly my user error. Allison, I'd love to hear how you handle things. Well, apparently it is a Midwest thing because I not only assume it's my fault, I beg the developer to tell me it's my fault. Because I always tell him, I said, look.
It's way better if I'm an idiot than if there's a bug in your software because I'm easier to fix. So hopefully just start at your sentence with, okay, moron, here's what the answer is. That's what I'm looking for. But if it's not the case, Here's the screenshots. Here's the video. I have a separate tag I've set up in CleanShotX's video upload service.
They have a cloud service so you can make a little video, upload it and then send a link. I actually have a tag for troubleshooting because I do this so often. And you guys talk about knowing developers. The way I know developers is because I do this. So I know a lot of developers now. I mean, I know the Rogue Amoeba people. They probably have a button for, okay, whose turn is it to have to answer Allison?
Not because they're buggy, because they're responsive. That's their penalty as I write back to them more. But I love a developer who likes it when I send them a video. And a lot of times that does show where I'm being stupid, which is perfect. That's how I make my little friends on the internet, is I annoy them with bug reports. And I thank you for it.
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of ExpressVPN for free. ExpressVPN.com slash clockwise and our thanks to ExpressVPN for its support of this show and all of Relay. All right, we are back from halftime and that means it's time for Dan's Topic. Hello, so my curiosity for you is, uh, do you live a multi-Mac lifestyle? Do you only use a single Mac? Do you use a Mac and an iPad? How do you balance all your multiple devices, what you use them for? And are there any that you've considered maybe giving up? Let's start with you, Chris.
This is a whole thing right now. So I have recently just gone back to the Mac after about a decade on the iPad. I am sitting in front of a 16-inch MacBook Pro. Pretty much... Specked out, M4 Max, 40-core GPU, 128 gigs of RAM, 4 terabytes of storage. This is my main machine now. This is where I'm doing all my video editing and podcast editing and photo editing and all the edits. This is pretty much where I work. extensively from right now.
but in probably the next couple hours, I will also have an 11-inch iPad Pro showing up. I sold my 13-inch iPad Pro. And I'm basically turning that into my very focused writing machine, email machine, business administration machine. So I kind of have this whole thing going on because... I got to the point where I was a little frustrated with the iPad and the current state of multitasking and background tasks and the state of the creative apps like Final Cut for the iPad.
So I am back on the Mac right now. I do have here a Mac Mini, the M4 Mac Mini, and also the M4 MacBook Air, but those are just review units. and I need to send those back. So really, I'm just working from the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and then in a couple hours, I will have an 11-inch iPad Pro. Well, I am definitely in the multi-Mac lifestyle. I have a Mac Studio that sits on my desk. It's a machine where I do most everything.
But I have an M2 MacBook Air, the little baby one, and that's been my favorite Mac I think I've ever owned. It's so lightweight. I can, I can... sit anywhere and do anything that I need to. I love being on macOS, and so I love that machine. Also, it's zippy quick, even though it's not incredibly spec'd out. Yeah, and as far as like... handling the balancing of multiple devices.
Most of the big stuff happens on the Mac Studio, like podcast recording and any editing that I happen to need to do, but doing all of my different shows. And then anything that's not that, being in other rooms and, you know, recipes, all sorts of stuff I tend to do from that MacBook Air. Despite the fact that I do have iPads, I do not use those for... anything. So yeah, it's an all Mac lifestyle here for sure. Allison, what about you?
Well, I'm almost like you. I use a 14-inch MacBook Pro hooked up to a big display as my primary podcasting machine, and I do my video recordings for screencasts online on that. and I work there a lot, but I also have a MacBook Air, the M2 MacBook Air, and I also love her so much. She is just wonderful. And I use her all pretty much when I get bored with sitting at my desk. I just get tired of sitting here. I want to go sit downstairs.
or I want to do some computing when I'm down maybe in the family room. But I also live on my 12.9-inch iPad Pro. I am convinced it's the wonderful keyboard, the, what is the fancy one called? All of a sudden, I'm drawing a blank. Magic Keyboard. Yes, the Magic Keyboard. I love that thing. It is one of my favorite keyboards to type on. So I type on that in the morning when I'm having my coffee in bed. I use it when I'm sitting.
An iPad for cross-stitching. I think I may have mentioned that before, but it's a great app for doing crafts for knitting and crocheting and cross-stitching because you can mark things up with a pencil, where you've been, what you've gotten done. And so I use it for watching video podcasts. I do a lot of writing on it too. I use Bearer.
to write my draft show notes so I can write them on any of my two Macs and my iPad. I can just seamlessly go between them to keep writing. And so all three of them seem to link together. Now, I used to only have one Mac. But I had a MacBook Pro, the M1 Max, and I had battery problems with it. And that's why I bought the second Mac, the MacBook Air, was because I had to keep it plugged in all the time. And so that's how that started.
These are all good answers. Interesting. I recently, I was using a Mac mini review unit from Apple because I reviewed the M4 Mac mini last year. and I had been balancing that with using my own Mac Mini as well as my MacBook Air. At one point, I think I had four different Macs going, and it was very confusing.
So I'm happy to be back down to two. And even there, I feel some pain points of dealing with things where stuff isn't quite lined up between my MacBook Air, which I often take out to coffee shops in the morning and do some writing on. And I come home and I do my podcasting and other work in the afternoon on the Mac Mini.
And sometimes I find I've installed an app somewhere, but not in the other one. Or I have a script running on one of them, but not on the other one. And I find that frustrating because I do my best to keep those things in sync. But there are some places where it feels like the system tries to thwart me. I have an iPad.
It doesn't get used very much these days. I occasionally travel with it like as a video watching machine or a casual like, you know, internet, you know, email and web browsing machine. If I'm just going somewhere and I like, I know I don't have to do any work. But around the house, it really only gets used when my wife and I do the crossword and then occasionally for some other random stuff. But I tend to either be on my phone or my MacBook Air.
So, you know, part of me wishes there was a way to more easily sync my account between my two different Macs and have stuff be more in line between the two of them. But I also understand there are challenges with that.
It is what it is. But, you know, I flirted with the idea of having one MacBook Pro that sort of does everything, but I just don't want to deal with docking and undocking stuff. It's just, I find it a pain. But who knows? Maybe it'll change. Anyways, thanks for your answer to that. Let's go to our final topic, which comes from Chris. Yeah, so WWDC is about a month away. So I want to hear from you all. What is one feature that you are hoping to see in one of the OS updates?
A feature specifically. You know, I would like... to see uh we've got the very cool iPhone mirroring functionality right and I think it would be cool If there was iPad mirroring, that's my answer. Allison, what about you? Mine's fairly simple too. I just would love to see them revamp all of settings on both macOS and iOS. And, you know, I might have mentioned that I've been doing this for 20 years and I can never find anything. I can't find anything anymore.
impossible, and we were promised that Siri would be able to tell us how to do things in settings, but it really can't. You can ask it questions and it'll pretend to answer, but it's often wrong.
And search. I mean, how hard is search? There's only so many. I mean, I know there's a lot in settings, but it's not that much stuff, right? You should be able to search settings. Why doesn't it work? Why is that so hard? I would like it all revamped. Start over. Make it where I don't know where anything is, but it makes sense. That's what I want.
The why is that so hard thing. I feel that. I feel that so much. My answer is actual good spam filtering in mail. Everywhere. Everywhere. Because right now... The Mac version has spam filtering. It's a million years old and it doesn't work very well. iOS and iPad have never had spam filtering for mail. There isn't any. It's weird. I don't get it. Like, the people who use their iPad don't get spam? I definitely still get spam!
I started using SpamSive last year or something after getting frustrated and finally hitting the end of my tether. And while it's good in some ways, I find it annoying that it is a separate utility that I need to run. And managing it between multiple devices is also a pain.
It feels like this is a thing that Apple could do better on its own. And this feels like a place, moreover, where the use of, dare I say, some sort of machine learning, or if you call it by another term, that's fine too, could be utilized to really be good at pattern matching and figure out these things. But I still get plenty of false positives. I still get plenty of stuff that makes it to my inbox that clearly shouldn't.
And it drives me a little batty at this point because we've been dealing with email and spam for... decades, and it hasn't gone away, and I think a lot of us just sort of shrug and deal with it. but it feels like a better solution should be part of the whole platform. I feel sane, Dan. Yeah, here we go. We're creating a united front here. Chris Bunch, wrap us up.
Yeah, so since I asked the question, I'm going to cheat and give you two. First one is a system-wide clipboard manager for iOS or an iPadOS. Like, either an API for third-party developers to hook in and make their own clipboard managers or a system-level feature. At this point, I do not care. I've been asking for this for a decade. Just a clipboard manager. And then the next one kind of was already implemented, but only in the EU. Support for other web engines!
Let's face it, people. You may not like Chrome, but half the internet is built specifically for Chrome. There's a lot of stuff I do that I need a Chrome browser. It's one of the things that kind of broke me on the iPad and I went back to the Mac. For example, my podcast, Comfort Zone, we use a service called Riverside to record it that only works with Chrome.
Every month, I have to upload a PDF document to a website that literally only works with Chrome. If I click the button in Safari, nothing happens, and trust me, I've tried everything. Literally, this website is old, janky, it just doesn't work with anything but Chrome. So Chrome, Clipboard Manager are really other web engines. It's already allowed in the EU because of the DMA. But just bring it everywhere, Apple. Just bring it everywhere.
Safari Web Engine is not going to take off anytime soon. It's not going to be the default for everyone. All right, hot take there at the end, but we stand. We can't help but to stand. Thank you. for the wonderful questions that have been asked today. We do have just enough time for a bonus topic. Before we get there, though, I do want to tell you about our swag. at clockwise.social. When you head to clockwise.social,
You'll know you're in the right place because you'll see Dan and you'll see Micah. That's me. And there you will also see links to our awesome swag, like a shirt and a tote and a hat and a mug and a phone case. and other clothing that you can get if you click on the shirt. I have much of what's available and it is all great, high quality, wonderful stuff. I drink coffee out of my clockwise mug all the time. And oh man, I love my clockwise hat.
So be sure to check that out. Zoom just raised the prices on us. So you buying clockwise swag helps us to continue to pay that Zoom bill. Thank you. Head to clockwise.social. Alright, my bonus topic for you. If you were a sea creature, what sea creature would you be? Allison? I'm going with sea turtle for 200, Micah. I have a little stuffed manatee that was given to me and my friends years ago, and it makes a variety of sounds when you squeeze it. And one of them says...
I like to sleep and rest, or sorry, eat and rest. And every time I think of that, I was like, yes, manatee, me too. So manatee it is. I'm going to go with sea lion, or should I have said what is sea lion? My girlfriend and I went up to San Francisco for our anniversary last year, and we sat and ate gelato and watched the sea lions for a good long while, and all they do is nap all day long, and that sounds like the perfect life to me.
Um, I am a professional code switcher, so I'm definitely going with the mimic octopus. It just so happens to be my favorite animal in general, but those things are so cool and I love them. So yeah, mimic octopus for this guy. Thank you, thank you to our listeners out there. If you would like to get ad-free episodes with an extra Unlound episode every week, where Dan and I talk to each other.
I almost said a phrase that had a bad word in it. I'm glad I didn't. Shoot the, you know what? Anyway, you can become a member of Clockwise. Just go to relay.fm slash clockwise and sign up. It's just $7 a month, $70 a year. and you will help support the show. With that, we have reached the end of this episode of Clockwise. All this left is to thank our wonderful guest. Allison Sheridan, congratulations on the upcoming 20 years of hosting an Apple-centric podcast, and thank you for being here.
What a better place to celebrate than clockwise. This was so much fun. And Christopher Lawley, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having me. I always love coming on. And Micah will be back next week. But until then, we remind everyone out there listening, watch what you say and keep watching the clock. Bye, everybody.