611: I Set a Trap

It's time for episode 611 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, June 25th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, where this year is almost half over, but this episode is just getting started. My name is Dan Morin, and I'm joined across the internet by my good friend, my pal, the one, the only, Micah Sargent. How are you doing today, Micah?

I am doing well, Dan. It's lightly sprinkling outside. Must be nice. Yes, it's a nice chill day. Wow. Okay, here it is a million degrees. I'm sorry to hear that. This is, of course, the show where we invite on two fantastic guests to talk about four tech topics. To my left this week, it is former Wired editor and director at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard, Meg Marco. Welcome back, Meg.

Thank you. It's hot outside, but it's warmer in here. I assume you mean in the podcast. It's just nice and toasty in the podcast. And to my left, a co-host of Primary Technology. it's steven robles welcome back to the show steven thanks so much for having me great to be here all right let me kick things off

Ah, artificial intelligence. You can't escape it. One of the narratives this week is that Apple might be considering purchasing an artificial intelligence company to bolster its failing or failed artificial intelligence ventures. of curious, do you think Apple needs to buy its way out of this dilemma? And if so, is perplexity, which is the much rumored firm that it might be considering, is that actually the right answer? Is there a right answer? I don't know. Meg, what do you think?

This is such a hard question, but it does seem that everyone is thinking about this, like every sort of legacy company is thinking about. What AI thing should we acquire to get ourselves back into it? So, you know, I think the threat of the idea of open AI coming out with devices is enough. that they really do need to address this with some sort of move. Is perplexity the right one? It's not the first one I would have.

thought of maybe but then again i'm not sure what the first one i would have thought of is because now that's stuck in my mind so um i think they have to be in that conversation there's no way out of it But that one does not seem to be the obvious fit to me. I agree. I think that... there's a potential shortcut that it can take by acquiring one of these companies for sure. You know, perplexity... I suppose is interesting in the way that it does things and kind of.

darted by really focusing on search. And so in that way, it kind of feels like the outlier underdog pirate flag waving. of the companies. So in that sense, perhaps old school Apple sort of vibes, in which case, I guess it makes a little bit more sense. But honestly, I find. all of this conversation exhausting and sort of thinking about Apple trying to figure out how to

catch up when we don't really know if that's how the company feels itself, that it needs to catch up and what the company's plans are and how it's pivoted. It's just hard to say, really, Dan. So, you know, that's how I feel. Stephen, what about you? So I actually did a video about perplexities at verse. Apple's assistant because perplexity added hooks into things like Apple music reminders and events. And it was so impressive how well perplexity is third party app could do things that even.

siri is bad at and so it's impressive on one sense but as far as acquiring it i think the biggest challenge for apple is actually getting the semantic index having the personalized assistant actually working and that's not something buying perplexity chatbot basically is going to help with, I don't think, unless it's an acqua hire and there's somehow people at perplexity that are better suited to this.

But I'm actually going to say maybe not. I mean, they have ChatGPT. That partnership is so integrated that there's now shortcuts actions with ChatGPT built in. And we just got a change in the roster where Craig Federighi is now going to be spearheading. the whole voice assistant and AI push. And so I don't know if buying perplexity is going to help them. I want to see what they do over the next six months. And yeah, we'll see. Yeah, those are all great thoughts. I think I... broadly agree.

Here's the thing. I've been doing this for almost 20 years, and the idea that Apple should buy a company to fix Problem X is certainly even older than me in this industry. They should have bought Nintendo. They should have bought Sony. They should have bought all these companies. And they rarely do. They buy very few, especially large companies, right? The largest acquisition they ever had was Beats, which was $2 or $3 billion. And that was like a decade ago.

problems with culture adaptations and stuff like that, they much more often tend to buy smaller companies that are developing technology that they can sort of spin into something they want or staff that they feel like are really passionate or... skilled on some particular topic. Perplexity seems to come with a lot of baggage, not least of all, you know, an article last year in Wired that said, described perplexity as a BS machine because of

Among other things, it had scraped a lot of websites that had even attempted to opt out of said scraping, which is also baggage I don't think they want. Apple made a very big deal last year when it introduced Apple Intelligence of saying that it was responsibly training much of it.

index now, you can take or leave how scraping the web deals with that. But if nothing else, they provided an option for opting out that they seem to respect. And I think that would add some bad PR that they don't necessarily need or want. So I'm less...

convinced that perplexity is the answer than that perplexity wants to get bought because it doesn't have much of an off ramp. But I do think that there is a strong argument that it needs to find some way of jumpstarting what it's trying to do in AI. And I think that is more likely to come from a small...

company you've never heard of that's being started by people who are trying to do something really new and maybe doing some cutting-edge stuff that these bigger companies haven't managed to pull off yet. The other angle about this, I'll mention really quickly, is that AI is still a very... much a moving target. We don't know how much of a moat there is around this technology. And if you pay $14 billion for something in today's valuation, it might not be worth that in a year.

who knows? Somebody else may come out and totally disrupt the market. And you've paid $14 billion for something that you didn't even really want. So I always caution buying something just because people are yelling about it. And I think Apple is smart enough not to make that mistake. Thank you all for your thoughts on that topic. Let's go to our second topic, which comes from Meg.

People are mad about the F1 Apple wallet coupon notification is a thing that I've come to know. I personally seem to have dodged this particular coupon notification, but it made me think about... about a time in the past in which I received a U2 album for free and said nothing against U2 as a band, but I did not want that album. i'm wondering would you all rather have a coupon or a u2 album because i do like coupons but i don't know that i want to push notification about them

I mean, between the two, yes, I would rather have a coupon, but I'd rather have neither. I regularly am annoyed at the ways that Apple... advertises its own stuff across its platform. I get the arguments that say it is its platform. It's, you know, it's store and in its own store, you can. put up ads about the thing that you own, but...

they just get in the way so often and they're annoying and you dismiss them and they keep coming back. That's the big thing that bothers me is if I express disinterest, don't. Remind me again. I'm fine. I'm good. I'm good. I didn't get this push notification. It would have... upset me. Not upset me, but it would have annoyed me a little bit if I had, simply because it does feel icky in the way that Apple stops third parties from

being able to advertise and it doesn't have to follow many of those same rules. So yeah, wasn't thrilled about this, especially about something that I do not care about at all. U2 or F1. Stephen, what about you? I did not get this notification either, but... It would bother me less to get this than the U2 album, which still lives in perturbably in everyone's phones or something, I guess.

I would have said maybe put this notification in an app like the Apple TV app, because this is like an Apple original movie. And if you have notifications turned on for the Apple TV app, maybe you're wanting to know about Apple's new releases, TV shows, movies, or otherwise. And so to put it in the wallet, which is an app most people, I would think...

want notifications from because it's charges to your credit cards and your personal finance stuff. It seems a little sneaky to put it in there. And so I think at least choose the right place. And if someone had turned off notifications for Apple TV, then. If it had gone there, then that notification should never have come through. So I don't know. Maybe choose a different avenue next time. I'm now trying to do the progression in my head. We had U2, F1.

something zero c zero i don't know where we're going but i feel like there's a code happening here i you know it's funny i didn't get this either so of this my guess none of us got it i'm feeling a little left out honestly um I get it. It's annoying.

I don't get these for some reason very much, I seem. I notice a lot of people talking about it, and I don't know what magic incantation I've done not to receive all these ads, but I feel like I don't get ads for a lot of the things people seem to see ads for. The alternative is I just so mindlessly...

dismiss them when I see them, that it doesn't even register. Maybe I'm inured for years and years of browsing the internet without an ad blocker and being assailed by ads left and right. And I just don't see it anymore. So that... Would I prefer Apple didn't do this? Absolutely. I think it sometimes looks cheap and a little trashy and self-serving, but I'm also not surprised in the least, and I don't get upset about it.

As far as whether I'd have this or a U2 album, this is a tricky one because that U2 album was my parting gift because I covered that event and I got laid off the next day. So all I got out of it was a lousy U2 album. So I still have some feelings around that one. Maybe I think I take the coupon. I like saving some money. But yeah, Meg, why don't you wrap us up? Sorry that I didn't know I had great emotional weight. Stretch something up there. I don't know. Sorry to have brought that up.

I have to wonder what's going on with Apple in terms of their promotions, right? This seems to be part of a larger pattern across all of their marketing and promotions in which they're putting stuff out in the world. And then they're kind of taking it back and having to apologize. And I'm just kind of wondering what's going on in that organization that that seems to be the case, right? I think that if they were to ask people sort of a similar question, maybe that, you know.

I posed here, they'd hear that there's great enthusiasm. for Apple's design and thoughtfulness around coupons and saving money. Wouldn't it be great if that was a thing that they could facilitate and put their design thinking against a coupon specific? Specifically for that, or, you know, to Steven's point, like associated with the product that it's actually a promotion for. But they seem to be kind of flopping. It's been what they've taken down like four different ads.

various good reasons for all of those but you kind of wonder what's going on over there what is going on over there Oh, well, I'll tell you what's going on over here. It's two topics down, two topics left to go, which of course means it's halftime here at Clockwise. And this week's episode is brought to you by our swag. That's right. You can buy Clockwise shirts, hats.

mugs, phone cases, tote bags, all that great stuff over at clockwise.social. And when you do, it helps support the show. It helps pay the Zoom bill. We really appreciate it because as you notice, this is taking the place of an ad. So thank you, everybody out there for your support. And that's it for halftime. Mike, I'm going to turn it over to you. Aha, it is my turn. And my question for you.

Just curious how often in this, I mean it across all of your devices, how often do you think about and in some cases do something about device battery health? Stephen, we'll start with you. So I am famously a battery percentage off on my iPhone because I don't like thinking about battery and the exact number is stressful. And so I try not to think about it once the social media...

rounds go where people are taking screenshots of their battery health and sharing it, you know, mid iPhone cycle. I will look. And then I also saw someone who was like, yeah, the battery health, your iPhone reports, even that's not accurate. And you can like export some analytics from your iPhone and see like the exact milliamp hour.

percentage left or whatever. I don't want to do any of that. I don't want to think about it. I'll like once I can't get through a day, then I'm like, OK, is something going on? And more often than not, it's because I made an hour long video. And so I was showing shortcuts on my phone screen.

And I was like, oh, yeah, that's why my battery died. So I tend not to think about it. Now that I have three kids with varying devices, they will report that they can't get through a day. And so, yeah, we have like 100 MagSafe batteries around the house, and that's my solution. I think I'm team Steven here. I also have battery percentage off. I don't like to think about it. I do have an automation that runs when it drops below 40% battery on my phone. It turns on low power mode.

Um, lately my watch has been dying by the end, like, like five o'clock. So I'm a little worried about that. Um, the phone though, particularly like.

I'm on the iPhone upgrade program. And because I write about these things, I get a new phone every year. So I very rarely worry about my phone battery life. Other stuff, I think that in general, the optimization that Apple has done for things on the iPad and the MacBooks over the past several... years like sure i noticed that things you know those batteries don't last as long as they used to but they still last like pretty much all day and i really have very little to complain about so

Yeah, every once in a while, I've shared a picture of that battery health when people are going around and surveying people to see how they've held up. But day to day, I don't really worry about it very much. What about you, Meg? I actually never think about it.

And sometimes my phone goes dead. So I guess I'm free from some... anxiety that other people are experiencing and that's good then again it is very annoying when my phone goes dead so I don't know maybe that anxiety is useful but I actually just really don't think about it hardly ever and then yeah sometimes i'm just that person who's got like a wire coming out of their like macbook into their phone and the middle of the day like i'm a nerd and that's that's the price The price we pay.

So this came up because I had a friend recently who reached out to me and said that their phone was dying and they didn't know if it was the battery or just that they had an older phone. And they looked at their battery settings and it was. showing that the... top reason for their phone is because they didn't have cellular service where they were. And so I actually did not know that that was one of the things that appeared. I thought this was super cool in your battery settings.

People who deal with this stuff all the time know that a phone will boost its power to try to find cellular service if it can't. And if you don't have anything nearby, that's going to only eat more and more and more of the battery. And the person's battery health ended up being pretty good for a two year old phone. And so we kind of talked about ways to deal with the.

low cellular in the area. But that's what brought it up for me, because I also don't have percentages turned on anywhere. I don't think about it. I've got charging spots all over the home. And so it doesn't really come up a lot, but it is something that I see from the non-tech minded quite a bit. There's some sort of like. Somebody at some point just put this.

horrible little spore of battery anxiety into the brains of so many people. And it still exists to this day. We all know how difficult it is to get rid of mold spores. So we need to get some kills and some Lysol.

and take care of it. But anyway, until we do, let's move on to our next topic, which comes from Stephen. So after Dub Dub, there were a lot of interviews with... Craig Federighi and Josuek about AI. And also they downplayed the idea of a chat bot. And so my question to all of you is maybe why is Apple against having an...

chatbot of its own? Or if you want to answer more interestingly, would you want a chatbot like interface? They seem to be pretty popular. ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of them. So would you want an Apple Intelligence chatbot app? I mean, maybe it seems too short-sighted to say not really. I mean, I think these products exist and they're pretty good at what they do. I'm not always convinced that what they do is...

broadly speaking, the most useful. And I worry a little bit about putting more and more in the hands of people everywhere because I think the tendency for misuse is high. But they are undeniably a part of the environment now, so it's hard to escape it. I think the issue is, is kind of we discussed earlier with perplexia, like what's the utility of this? What can I do with an Apple chatbot that I can't do with ChatGPT or Gemini or any of these others?

Because the integrations already with ChatGPT, and one would assume at some point with maybe other third-party AI services, suggest that there is a lot of things... There's a lot of things that you could potentially integrate with and sort of trade information back and forth between your phone and what's on these remote servers.

I've played around a little bit with the Apple Model Access in Shortcuts. It just published a piece on Six Colors about this this morning. And I found one of my problems with it is I wanted it to do tasks for me, but it was unreliable, as these things often are. I would ask it...

to oh can you give me the first you know for my bill i'm filing receipts i'm like ah can you tag this with the first five characters of the vendor name it's like here you go here's the first six characters i'm like i'm pretty sure i said five it's like i can't count uh

Or it would throw in things, my expense with no decimal points, and suddenly it's registering, oh, you paid $20,000 for those airline tickets. I was like, I hope I'm flying first class. And the fact that I have to check it all the time. does not fill me with confidence. And so am I really saving any time at that point? So I could have a chatbot that's integrated and do some of these things for me, but I feel like maybe that's just creating more work for me to do.

I'm not sure that Apple adding this functionality in there is super useful until it can deliver on the kind of promises it made last year where it's like, actually, hey, my phone has all my information about me. It would be great if I... I don't have to go out to ChatGPT and transmit this information to a third party in order to do stuff on my phone. But we're not there yet. So ask me again when we've actually made some progress in those, I think. Meg, what do you think?

Well, I could not agree more with that. I've been saying for a little while now that, you know, and this is a problem for Google, is that people don't really want to search. That's not an enjoyable activity, searching. They want to delegate.

want things to be done rather than search for them and then do them so you know the first company to really get that right in a trusted um efficient way um that's going to be really really valuable um and i don't think it's just a technological problem like do these chatbots have the sort of ability to functionally do the things we're asking them to do but also how are they making the very many decisions that need to

be made in order to do something as simple as you know booking an airline ticket right um how does what the chat bot thinks of you based on the data that it knows about you how is it optimizing in ways that you might not be able to know like these are really important questions that aren't just sort of like a ux thing and you know those are the things i think about and you know is apple the company

that could do that. They're certainly the company that has the most data on me if you include the onboard data on my device, right? So that's the company that I would expect. to be able to do that to actually do things that i want to be done um i i don't know that they're going to get there first but it's a really interesting question yeah i I don't know that I want sort of a chat bot app, right? That it's its own little thing that exists that I go to it and I put stuff in.

I do want this idea of, it's essentially like spotlight, but it's got all of the built-in magic. And so it can see the stuff. It knows everything that it needs to know about me because I'm logged into iCloud and I can just say, what are my events look like today? Or I can say, oh, can you add that? recent thing to my calendar, and it just knows what that means. That is the kind of idea of what I want, more so than just I hop into this.

specific app and I'm able to type something in and get a response. I've actually been trying to be more forgiving lately to, in general, no, to Siri. ask it questions for the first time in a very long time, because I just stopped doing it because it didn't work. And I'm... Of course, having all of my bad feelings reinforced. So yeah, I would like to see that. But then again, I don't even know if I would ever use it because it just has always disappointed me. Stephen, what are your thoughts?

Well, I've set a trap and lured you all in because I argue that they already have a chat bot and it's the AI models action in shortcuts, which you can even toggle the follow up. thing on in that action and have a conversation with Apple's private cloud compute model, on-device model, or ChatGPT. And I think I saw Federico Vatici do this first, but I built a shortcut that basically will take the same prompt.

and run it through all three models and so the local on device private cloud compute and chat gpt and then put together all three of the answers in like a note and you could see what each one returns And how I use ChatGPT on my Mac all the time is when I make videos for YouTube, I transcribe it, I give that transcript to ChatGPT, and then I have a prompt that asks it for a title, for a description idea, for tags that are under 500 characters.

and then i ask it what were the two videos i mentioned at the end so i can just quickly tag it when i'm uploading the video to youtube so i did the same thing with all of apple's models and i took the transcript, did the prompt, and it is so clear how far behind Apple's AI models are. One, because they just don't follow instructions, like make the tags less than 500 characters every time. went way over that and the apple models never even told me what videos i mentioned at the end

And of course, the ChatGPT one gets it every time. It gets the right amount of tags, the right amount of characters. It tells me what videos I mention at the end. And overall, just the titles and descriptions are better. They're just better YouTube titles. They're better descriptions.

And so I think one of the reasons why Apple keeps downplaying the whole chatbot is chatbot idea is because theirs would not be a good chatbot like it just does not have the knowledge and i just saw on mastodon i think today that the training data is only up to like 2023 so if you ask apple's models it's it's pretty out of date already

let alone being able to, it can't do web searches right now. So I think they're downplaying it because they don't have a good one. And I'm glad the ChatGPT extension is there because otherwise the on-device models would be good for like very, very menial tasks. But there's a lot of use cases that I won't be able to use Apple's models specifically. So that's my answer. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. We have just enough time for a bonus topic.

I want to know, because it's hot where I am, what is your favorite ice cream or frozen dessert flavor, Meg? Well, I would like to use this opportunity to lobby the Dairy Queen Corporation to bring back my childhood favorite, which was the Crunch, at the time Nestle, Crunch. blizzard which is impossible to find and let me tell you all is delicious i don't know why this went away please please bring it back for me

We have a lot of fans in Dairy Queen, I'm sure. So this is right to their ears. I'm going to go with pistachio ice cream. Love it. That's pretty good. I will say I'm going to give two answers tonight. Doe Ben and Jerry's is life changing. It's usually my go to, but also public supermarkets down here in Florida has their own brand of ice cream.

And one of their flavors is called Chocolate Trinity. Play on words there. And it's pretty great. It's chocolate ice cream, fudge, and like other chocolate pieces. It's wonderful. And so Chocolate Trinity is another top one for me.

Man, I have to try that next time I'm in the area because everything chocolate is my answer. If there's, you know, none more chocolate in the words of Spinal Tap. I like my chocolate ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. And if you're going to put pieces of chocolate in it, I'm okay with that. I'm here for you. Thank you. How about crunch bars? Yeah, sure. Throw those in. Why not? All right. That brings us to the end of this week's episode. But before we go, I want to remind all of you.

that if you would like ad-free episodes of Clockwise, in addition to our brand new Clockwise Unwound short segments, you can do that by becoming a member of Clockwise. Go to relay.fm slash clockwise and sign up. For just $7 per month or $7 a year, you'll help support the show. And you'll get a nice little segment afterwards where Mike and I talk about a tech topic. It's a lot of fun. You should do it and support the show. We really appreciate it.

All that remains is for us to thank our fantastic guest this week. Meg Marco, thank you so much for joining us once again. Thank you for having me. And Stephen Robles, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me as well. And, Michael, we'll be back next week. But until then, we remind everyone listening out there, watch what you say. And keep watching the clock. Bye, everybody.