It's time for episode 606 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, May 21st, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to clockwise the podcast where time is marching on. And time is still marching on. My name is Dan Morin, and I am joined across the internet, not by my usual host, Micah Sargent, his way this week, but to fill in for him, it is co-creator of Clockwise and co-host emeritus, Jason Snell. Welcome back, Jason.
It's great to be here on episode 606, which is the mark of the mild beast, possibly. And I got your They Might Be Giants reference in the intro. Well done. Thank you. We're older than we've ever been, Jason, and now we're even older. Joining us this week are two fantastic guests to my left. It is podcast creative director Christopher Finn. Welcome back, Chris. Hello, folks.
And to my left, it is the co-founder of Snail Dead Development, also a prolific podcaster these days. It's Rosemary Orchard. Hi, Rose. Welcome back. Thank you for having me. All right. We got time for four tech topics. I'm kicking things off. Fortnite is back in the App Store in the U.S. after five years.
Does this move the needle for either Apple or Epic in this ongoing struggle? Is there a lasting impact to this? Or more to the point, do you think it will even last? Chris, let's start with you. Apple does not, will not, really ever care about gaming at anything other than a surface level. It will tolerate it, it will use it as a really good example of how to show off the dramatic capabilities of its own hardware, especially.
But institutionally, it just does not care about gaming. I mean, I kind of care about Fortnite only as much as my kid likes it. And, you know, the fact that it can now run on devices that she might have as well as on her Switch is good. But I really struggle to make any kind of enthusiasm about these kind of announcements. just because
It seems like institutionally, Apple doesn't give a damn. I mean, moving the needle is what Dan asked, and I don't know what the answer is for that, but I will say... This is another chip off of Apple's whole life. impervious sphere. They're not beleaguered, but they are off their track a little bit. And I think that that's good because I think it's a bad track that they were on. So I don't know. I think every little bit helps is sort of what I would say. I think that this suggests that
Unless there's a reversal in the U.S. that everybody who develops apps can have them have alternative payment methods in the U.S. It's just another part. of an ongoing game i i hope that at some point it shakes apple and out of its complacency uh but uh i don't know i i think you could overstate how big a deal this is but i think it is really interesting that after all this fighting and after epic losing most of it most of the case
it still ends up sort of looking like a winner. That's kind of wild, but that's where we've gotten. Rosemary, what do you think? There is a lasting impact. We've already seen the fact that the Kindle app now allows people to buy Kindle books. and things like that. And I feel like that is a sort of positive thing that we're going to be getting out of this.
long term um i mean it's one of these things where especially with uh you know pay to play games uh where there's lots of in-app purchases to get more gold to do more things I actually kind of preferred it when everything had to go through Apple because at least then, you know, parents had a way of...
looking at it and locking that down versus it being in another system where their credit card info is stored and them not realizing that and so on and so forth. It does get really messy really quickly from that perspective. I feel like that may be a potential negative velocity impact. But we're going to have to see. It's one of these things where is the needle moving? Well, we're only looking at it in two dimensions right now, up and down.
These are all really interesting perspectives. I think we all kind of took it from different angles, and that's fascinating to me. I think combining some of what you folks were talking about. I think there's an argument that Apple is maybe spiritually beleaguered right now. It's kind of struggling under the weight of its success. and how to deal with that. And that's been the case for many years, obviously. The fact that Apple doesn't really care about or get gaming...
It works with the fact that they took essentially the most popular game in the world and were just perfectly happy not to have it on their platform for five years.
right? I mean, if they actually thought it had any value I think they probably would have tried to cut more of a deal or tried to figure out a way to make it work but it shows that they are just so not only enamored of their own bottom line, but also to a certain extent just so bought into their own hype that they're like, well, it's the biggest game in the world, but we're the biggest platform in the world and we don't care.
And they're willing to be, frankly, petty about some of it as well. And all of that combines to a feeling that is kind of uncomfortable. I am curious to see how this will continue shaking out. Everything feels a little tenuous right now, but... As of the moment, I believe Overnight is back to the top free game in the U.S. App Store.
You know, it's not that it isn't popular and it's not that Apple can't get something out of it, but they're not going to get out of it as much as they'd like to. Thank you again for all your answers on that. Let's move to our second topic, which comes from Chris. Against all expectations, I find myself loving my printer. And it just sits here and does what it's supposed to do. It is, to quote Nayli Patel, just one of those brother laser printers that everyone has.
But now that I love my printer rather than hating it with the heat of a thousand fiery suns, what tech platform or product at home should I turn my fiery eye to next? What should I hate next? I have two thoughts. One is, since we're on the subject of dimensions, now that you've embraced your two-dimensional paper printer, it's time to destroy three-dimensional printing.
and just recede back into flatland. So any 3D printers should just get kicked out. They use plastic. We don't need more plastic in the world. Get them out. My alternative is, I guess you should hate... Paper shredders? No? Because they're your mortal enemy because you're generating lots of paper.
I don't have a good answer for this. I also have a printer. I think everybody uses technology in ways that serve them. I don't use my printer a lot, but I finally bought a laser printer because I decided I was tired of... all the ink drying up in all of my jet printers, and I'm really happy with it. So I honestly don't know. That's the best I got. Rosemary.
Well, I mean, the obvious thought is scanner because scanners and printers are often a bundled combination where neither is particularly great. But my real answer is a microwave or anything that requires a PhD Pro Plus Mac. to read and understand the manual, to change the time on the clock. Because... of those just need to like decide for themselves what the time is and figure it out and either don't ever show me a time or show me the correct time
There is nothing worse than things not showing me the right time. I actually have a smart plug. on my microwave. Partially tomorrow to power usage, but predominantly so that if the time on it is wrong, it can turn the microwave off and on again at the right time in the morning to automatically set the time because I genuinely don't know how to set that. Like that is my way of doing it. So I have to do it at like one o'clock in the morning. That's incredible. That's my plug for it.
I feel like smart home tech, there's a lot of smart home tech that drives me a little bit bananas because the market has been in such flux for years, you know, moving between things like bluetooth to thread and you know standard proprietary protocols to matter and it's gotten better but there are a lot of like little you know widgets and gadgets that sometimes have their own very peculiar
requirements for being set up like okay you got to hold this button down it's got to join a wi-fi network and get on it it's like oh my god you're like you're killing me why can't i just point my phone at it and have it work and more and more things are like that but you know i don't necessarily want to go around replacing all the smart home tech that i already have so that sort of weird combination of things is is one thing that drives me even as the other thing is probably
That's probably some form of like networking hardware, like maybe cable modems. I don't know. The best cable modem is one that you never have to do anything with. You plug it in and it works. You never have to think about it again. Anything that I have to think about again, it's that you're going in the trash. Goodbye. So maybe it's that. Maybe it's networking hardware. Somewhere in that morass of various technologies.
Anyways, thank you for summoning the hatred in all of us, Chris, who want to wrap this up. I think hatred is such an underappreciated force in technology. I think it is worth reflecting, perhaps, sometimes, that those of us who have been working with technology for a long time... do go through phases of absolutely detesting all technology at all levels in all its forms and I think there have been some places where technology has gotten so much better. I remember back in the day,
You could have a sixth sense for when Mac OS, sorry, System 7.5 was about to crash just because of the way it acted. And now things generally don't crash. They screw up in lots of other ways, but they generally don't crash. Maybe I should rather than looking for a home for my hate, acknowledge the delightful tech utopia we now exist in.
All right, that's two topics down, two topics left to go, which of course means it is... halftime here at Clockwise, and this week's episode is brought to you by Terminal.
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and use clockwise for 15 bucks off your order for one week only. That's use terminal, U-S-E-T-R-M-N-L dot com slash go slash clockwise, and clockwise for a $15 off, and you own it forever, no subscriptions. Our thanks to Terminal for supporting Clockwise and all of Relay. All right. Halftime is over. Jason Snell, over to you. We got to see, after many years of not seeing it, CarPlay Ultra. in Aston Martin in Palm Springs on a video from Top Gear. And there was a press release from Apple.
It made me think, for those of us who don't have Aston Martins or aren't in the market for a new car that's going to offer CarPlay Ultra, just more broadly, i want to survey here do you use carplay or android auto if you're an android user do you like it and this is the key question i think would you choose what car to buy next Based on whether it's there or not. Rosemary? I honestly would consider this a basic requirement because I trust Apple with my data, at least relatively speaking.
I don't trust car manufacturers to be good stewards of my data. like all of that data just gets put into a system and let's face it car manufacturers have got enough other things that they're focusing on the experience of using native in-car software is pretty much always suboptimal. I much prefer the fact that I have all of my calendar data and everything right there so it pulls up.
my events and suggests locations based on things like that so I wouldn't buy a car that didn't have carplay however it is fairly ubiquitous I would like more CarPlay integration in my car, but if I plug my phone in instead of using it in more or less CarPlay, I do get things like directions on the display nexus speedometer. So that's pretty cool. And yeah, I like having all of the data there. So yeah, I absolutely do use CarPlay and I consider a requirement in any future vehicle.
My car's about 13 years old. It predates CarPlay. However, I did add a head unit to it back in 2019 that is CarPlay compatible, so I have CarPlay, and I've had it for... a long time now. So I'm probably in the market for a new car sometime in the next few years. And at that point, yes, I would absolutely insist upon having CarPlay in it. I think it is weird to think like that.
something that would make that big a difference for me in purchasing, but it definitely would. And part of that is my experience driving other cars both with and without CarPlay. One of the great things about CarPlay is, as Rose mentioned, the ubiquity and the fact that you can take your phone with you and your phone essentially becomes the UI.
That's great because I travel and I rent cars. And you know what I don't want to have to do when I rent a car? Figure out a new user interface every single time. I was in the UK last year and I rented a car. And I've already got to get used to driving on the other side. I don't want to have to mess with car controls at the same time. But the car we rented had CarPlay, which was great. All our maps were there. All our contacts were there. All our music was there to entertain a small child.
perfect like that for me is the best part about it is getting into a car uh you know at the airport or whatever you're stressed you've got your bags you're trying to figure out where you're going and to not have to fumble around and figure out like oh my god where's the maps By comparison, I once rented a Tesla SFO and drove it down to Cupertino for an Apple event and... I...
I swear to God, I thought I was going to die on that highway because I did not know how to adjust my mirrors, much less get my map. So that drove me crazy. And I was like, this is not happening. Yeah, CarPlay, preferably as much of it as possible in any future car. Chris, what about you? Same, same, same. So I got a new-to-us car in August of last year, and it's a little Honda E. It is adorable, it's beautiful, I love it to pieces, and it came with colourplay.
And I wouldn't buy a car on the basis of whether it had a CarPlay or not, but it's at the very top of my list of things that are important when I'm making the decision about which model to buy. It's astonishing to me that General Motors in particular is moving away from CarPlay and Android Auto. It's pulling away from that. They cite a bunch of different reasons.
But they are all questionable and you can see the power struggle as companies want to hold on to that user experience and especially as they want to be able to charge for things. Hey, $600 to unlock your own heated seats that are already in the car. It's difficult not to be cynical about that, and it's difficult not to... not to be an Apple fanboy or an Android fanboy when you look at the advantages that these systems can bring to you and just the fact that
all of your data information is increasingly held in this little thing and you can ameliorate that experience so nicely. Stepping into my car, The wireless CarPlay Connect. And everything is there and my life just continues. There's no sort of friction as I stop between them. It's just joyous. And it was absolutely one of the key considerations when I bought that car.
We recently bought a used but new to us 2023 Chevy Bolt, so it's the last of the old GM cars with CarPlay, and it's the first integrated carplay car that we've ever owned my daughter's car i put a carplay head unit in at some point and it's great it's been a lot of fun to play with it I don't know if I would say I would refuse to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay, but certainly it would weigh on me because having driven a bunch of cars that don't have CarPlay, you know, I end up...
For me, it's a lot of stuff. It's just like the interface of being like, oh, I need to do something. I guess I need to do it on my phone. I can't use my phone when I'm driving, so I'm just going to not. And I don't love it. um and and carplay kind of eliminates all of that plus i you know
I really do. My life is in my phone, right? It's not in my car. And so I think that priority-wise, I'm always going to prefer the data from my phone to the data on a car with software that hasn't been updated in years and all of that. I continue to be baffled. by companies that think that our smartphones are not as important to us as our cars because the smartphone data is super personal. And I think we've all just shown that here. So I appreciate it.
Rosemary, time for our last topic, and it's yours. What do you have for us? Well, I was wondering, and this is perhaps where things have changed, because I was looking at my home screen the other day, and I am very widget-centric. The majority of my home screen is widgets with a couple of app icons. I picked up my dad's iPhone and went, oh my gosh, folders. Folders everywhere.
And so I was wondering, what do your home screens look like? And also, what do your docs look like? What apps have actually made it into your doc? Or are they maybe shortcut sections? So I did alter my home screen a couple years ago. For a long time, I had a 4x4 grid of icons and then a blank row at the bottom because I liked having a little bit of separation between the icons and the dots.
But I decided I could like sort of optimize a little better. And so what I've ended up with is I have at the top of my screen a widget for calendar, which displays the current date because that is just information I like having handy. And when your phone is open, you can't find it. I also have a clock widget because I like having a second hand visible. Sometimes I like to load time stuff or have a second hand that I can just look at.
And there's no other way to get that. You can have the tiny little clock icon, but I was like, what if I just had a giant clock widget instead? Then I have a handful of my usual apps, things like messages and camera and photos, et cetera, et cetera. I keep, fill the rest of the screen. All right, my doc. My doc has been basically unchanged for more than a decade. And that's part of why I cannot change it because I know where everything is. So I have
I have the phone app. It's there. I need to know where the phone app is. How do you phone people down? I talk to my mom a lot. My mom I talk to on the phone. So it's like the mom button, basically. I have mail, because I still rely on email. I have Safari, because that's what I'm doing most of the time on my phone.
I have settings because I want to find the stupid settings all the time. I need to get in there. Those are the things I always want to know. No matter what page I'm on, I want to have access. of the settings and my mail and my web browser. I'm a million years old. I understand this, but I'm very comfortable with who I am. My phone home screen is the equivalent of one of those TV remotes with the giant buttons on it for old people.
uh anyways yes roast me uh chris you're up i'll start at the dock then i actually just about a month ago kicked safari out of my dock for the first time since 2007 and getting the first iphone and that was because I wanted to put signal in there. I wanted to try to improve my muscle memory for using signal rather than WhatsApp. I'm trying to sort of de-meta myself, particularly in process of their moderation policies.
So I put Signal into the dock and kicked Safari out of it. So my dock is messages, WhatsApp, still there, Signal, and then Ivory for Mastodon. And it's always insane. Maybe it's a neuroplasticity thing, but there's occasions where I change the layer of the apps on my phone.
i gotta be really sure that this is a thing i want to do because i will spend the next month being like opening the wrong thing going why am i looking at this app that's not what i want what did i want to do do i like cheese dear So that's very confusing. But the rest, like half, I spoke about this on Clockwise before, more than half of my screen is taken up with a huge widget for Fantastical.
which is an amazing calendar app. I really love it. And my entire life runs through Fantastica. I have a very sort of surrendered wife attitude to my diary. I put things in my diary and then I just look at my phone and go, what am I doing today, dear? And it tells me. because otherwise everything fails to even small personal things go into there so my home screen looks mad but it does at least have some sense of order my daughter who's nine her home screens
are the work of absolute insanity. Particularly now when Apple allows you to place apps randomly, she took that to heart and placed apps incredibly randomly. i only have one screen so really i have a two screen approach on my phone where i've got my home screen single page and then off to the left is the today or whatever screen that is, you know, that has widgets on it.
so on my main screen i have a large widget at the top it's my weather widget i'm actually using the custom widget that i wrote using javascript in the scriptable app to show a weather forecast for my town and current data from my weather station.
and then if i swipe it's a stack and if i swipe it goes to mercury weather if i'm traveling because mercury weather has a widget that will show you it moves the location based on your where you're going to be you tell it where you're going to be and it says so i've got weekend trip coming up and it shows me wednesday thursday friday here and then saturday sunday monday in my destination that's and then tuesday wednesday back here that's awesome
As a result, the apps in my dock aren't that important because they're just at the bottom. They aren't on multiple screens because I only have the one screen. So Overcast, Safari. Slack. Why is it there? I still do use Slack a lot.
And then the other one really rotates. I'd say, you know, i don't know messages but sometimes it's mail but sometimes it's discord i don't know um but that's about it and then and i'll just say on that widget screen the most important things there is I've gotta find my...
widget for my wife so I can see where she is on her commute home so I can figure out when she's gonna get here and like I'm making dinner or what our plans are I've got that I've got flighty there and I have a 4up shortcut widget That is entirely things for the Roomba app. because I find the Roomba app very frustrating, but they have shortcuts and points, so it allows me to have really quick buttons to say, stop the robot.
send the robot home, pause the robot, or open the app, which is not on my home screen, and then I can do other Roomba things there. So that's my tour. It's not very exciting, but I have managed any app that doesn't fit on the home screen. It's just... Something I find with Spotlight. Raspberry? What I find fascinating is none of you mentioned different home screens for different focus.
Because I changed my home screen based on my focus mode. So I have different widgets while I am doing my day job. Right now I'm podcasting. So I have a giant widget for the tips app. only because it prompts ideas for things to talk about in the future for iOS today because, you know, coming up with topic ideas is always kind of tricky. So I often use that to help prompt me. And then, yeah, my doc is the thing that stays constant because everything else changes. So my doc has...
Not Safari, but a shortcut to open DuckDuckGo in Safari so that I don't fall down the rabbit hole of the previous tab that I had open and forget the thing that I was attempting to do. It has the Shortcuts app, which I don't think will surprise anybody at all. It has OmniFocus.
And then it has the next app that Snail Data is working on, which is called Capsule, a little medication tracker. But then the widgets on my main home screen, I've got two of the long ones and they're a small one. And then I actually have four app spots. One of those is actually a folder for all of my social media messaging and communication apps because I like the way that I just have one badge.
of all of the things where people are trying to get my attention and I can tap and hold on that and just jump straight to whichever app it is where people need my attention and I don't potentially have badges dotted around in multiple places. So folders still have their place in my life.
but not as much as they do on my dad's iPhone, where once I introduced my mom to the app library, she was like, this is amazing. I don't have to find apps anymore. I can just go in here and look, particularly the alphabetical list.
My dad, on the other hand, has a system and is continually surprised when I try and find something on his phone, look at it for about... three seconds and then i just open spotlight and search for it instead uh that to him is baffling to me his folder approach is baffling but it's fine it's his phone he can do what he likes with it as long as it's you know not hurting me
All right, that's four topics down. We've got just enough time for a bonus topic. Really quick, I want to remind you, if you would like to support the show, please get some Clockwise swag. You can find it at clockwise.social, t-shirts, hats, mugs. tote bags. Everything you could possibly need with a clockwise logo and buying that merch supports our show and helps us keep the Zoom bill running. The Zoom bill running? Keep Zoom running. All right. Bonus topic time. Do you have a favorite bird?
Chris? I think a kingfisher. It's a beautiful bird. And I've seen one twice in my life. Once cycling to the recycling centre in Dundee, where I live in Scotland. And you cycle along a little path beside her. stream and at one point I just caught this absolute flash of turquoise from the left.
And it was a kingfisher just zipping up that stream. And it was such a beautiful thing. They're such elusive little birds, but it's so, so, so pretty. It's a boring bird, but I love it. It's a house finch. And the reason is that during the pandemic, we had a house finch that started...
tapping on the window of our front door. And we're like, what is that bird doing? Why does it keep tapping there? And it turns out right above our door, there's a little tiny space where there's a gap basically under the eaves of our house
that they built a nest. This bird and its partner built a nest and they had little baby chicks and it's the only time it's ever happened and it was during the pandemic and so we watched them and rooted for them and we're very excited for them and we named that bird Tappy because Tappy tapped on our door and her male partner was Mr. Tappy and they're house finches and they're just kind of boring birds but you know every time I see a house finch now I'm like oh Tappy so
It's a house finch. That's the answer. Rosemary? I'm gonna mention specifically my favorite kind of owl is actually one of the smallest kinds of owls. It's an elf owl and they only get to be like five and a half inches in length and their wingspan is only ten and a half inches. And they are tiny and adorable and I just want to pick one up and cuddle it. I feel like it probably wouldn't appreciate that.
And also it's quite far away. It's mostly in the southwest of the US and Mexico. So that would be problematic. But yeah, I love tiny owls because who doesn't? I'm going to pick penguins. I like penguins. Or penguins, if you're a Benedict Cumberbatch fan. Specifically, Southern Rockhopper penguins, which have these cool, yellow, crusty, punk rock.
brow thing. I don't know. They have some at the New England Aquarium, which is very close to us. You know what? I'm always happy to see a penguin. All right. If you would like to support the show, We have a brand new feature for our members. It's called Clockwise Unwound. It's a short weekly segment after the main show wraps up where I and
my co-host of the week, usually Micah, but maybe today Jason, chat about a tech topic. And so if you'd like to get that, plus ad-free episodes, go to relay.fm slash clockwise and sign up for just $7 per month or $70 a year. You'll help support the show. And with that, we have reached the end of this week's episode. All that remains is to thank our fantastic guest, Chris Finn. Thanks so much for being here. Absolute pleasure as always.
And Rosemary Orchard, thank you, as always. Thank you very much for having me. And Jason, thank you for sitting in. Michael 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.