¶ Primary Apple Watch Features
It's time for episode 629 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, October 29th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the show that's always a treat, never a trick. My name is Dan Moore and I'm joined across the internet by my good friend, my pal, the spookiest co-ghost you could have. It's the one and only Micah Sargent. How you doing today, Micah? Hello, Dan Morgan. How are you today? That's just another name, though.
Oh, shoot. Not Morgan. Morgan. I heard it, but it just sounds like you mispronounced my name. Dran Morgan. That's fine. Whoever I am. Well, this. is the show where we talk to two fantastic guests about four tech topics to my left this week it is software visionary and supernatural monster hunter guy english welcome back to the show guy i go by ghoul english Guy English. To my left, as I quickly try to think of something, we've got podcaster, fiber artist.
D&D player extraordinaire and the scariest of pumpkins. It's... How Aline Sims. Yeah, it was right there. Nice. There you go. Hi. Really, really dug it out, Micah. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. Let's start. with our first of our four topics, which comes from me. I want to know if you do wear an Apple Watch, is there a feature you use for it more than any others?
A feature you use it for. That sounds a better way to phrase it. Is there something you do with it that is sort of the primary driver of that device? If you don't have one, is there something that, like if it did that, you would get one? But I'm hopeful that most of you have Apple Watches.
We'll start with you, Guy. The health stuff I use quite a bit, basically just to track how lazy I've been. I love seeing those rings not closed, just inching closer and closer to my failure every day. But honestly, probably timers. And adding stuff to my shopping list, which I understand feels like three different things. But beyond the health stuff, which I'm taking as the only reason to be wearing it, basically.
Telling Siri to do the very, very most basic and simple things like add something to my shopping list. And only my shopping list because she manages to screw up everything else. And basically setting timers for when I'm cooking. And that's... basically it. I don't really dive deep into a whole bunch of the features of the Apple Watch. I certainly don't listen to podcasts or anything on it. We have a meal subscription service, Daily Bob. So most nights I'm making our dinner.
And so I, more than anything else, use it for timers. Like Guy, I also have the other features there that I use throughout the day, but I don't use them actively, I guess. It's sort of... Sometimes that information is helpful, particularly when it's making me feel better about myself, because there have been a few times where it's like, hey, you've been...
a lot more active lately than you have been. And I said, you know what I have, and I'm proud. And so that's always nice. Um, I, I don't wear my watch to bed or anything like that. So yeah, it's mostly my little timer, my little timer friend. What about you, Aline? I fell off using my Apple Watch. I had a stainless steel one and it was too heavy and it was hurting my wrist to wear it. And the things that I used to use the watch for.
playing and pausing audio. I never listened to like podcasts or audio books from my watch specifically. I would like have headphones on and be bopping around the apartment doing stuff. But now I can do that on. My AirPods, you know, I can play and pause audio really quickly. If I'm wearing my AirPods Max, I can adjust the volume really easily. And so I don't don't use it a lot anymore.
These are interesting answers. We sort of ran the gamut here, although the thing that came to mind for me was... Apple Pay, which is something I do on my watch much more than I do on my phone. Everybody has it now, sure. Yeah, I use Apple Pay a lot. I'll use my phone sometimes, but most of the time my phone is not out.
when I am walking into the coffee shop or the grocery store or something like that. And so Apple Pay is just super convenient on the watch. But I use it for a bunch of other stuff. I mean, I started doing more running this year and I would run just with my watch, even though I don't have a cellular watch. So I would load up some music on it. I would use the built-in workouts or the Nike Run Club workouts for that. Lately, since the WatchOS 26 updates, I've used the sleep tracking, although...
My embarrassing thing, I have a second watch for that because my actual watch does not last that long. And I happen to have a loaner unit. And so I've been using that for sleep tracking with some...
Questions about sleep tracking. But yeah, the health features and stuff are all great. I think there's a lot to get for that. I do use it for notification stuff too. I don't have a ton of notifications that go to it, but I like being able to get a message from my wife or something and just be able to glance down at it.
even if I can't always respond to me or whatever. Sometimes I just can't get to my phone. It's in my pocket. I'm washing dishes, something like that. So I do find it amazingly versatile device, but it does a lot more even than all the stuff that I use it for. So it's interesting to hear how you feel.
¶ Navigating HomeKit Setup Nightmares
folks use it or not. Thank you all for your answers on that topic. Let's go to topic number two, which comes from Guy. So I've just moved from Canada down to California to be with my wife. And along with that came all of my HomeKit lights and... random accessories like that. Has anybody ever tried to reconfigure a home with new people in it and include their existing Apple TV and stuff? It is a nightmare. So I guess my question is...
Has anybody slain this dragon of using HomeKit in a reliable way in, like, moving the setup, I suppose? Like, once it's all fixed, don't touch it. It's like a spider's web of chaos. You don't want to disrupt it. I love this question. It's something, so moved from California to Portland a little over a year ago. What I found... especially because of the HomeKit update to the architecture.
And the inclusion now of Matter devices and Matter over Thread devices and Matter over Thread via HomeKit devices. I hate to say it, but I had to just nuke. my HomeKit setup and start fresh setting everything up again. And I went through to all of the apps of the like the first party apps of these devices. And, you know, removed the HomeKit integration there first and then went into.
home and removed the home and went through the process of making sure that, you know, I turn on my Apple TV, I turn on the other devices that have access to that home so that they can all see, oh, he deleted it and we need to sync. start fresh. And then once everything agreed that there was no more home, then I was able to set up a new one.
And that has been the best thing that I have done in terms of responsiveness and steadfastness and and reliability of my HomeKit setup. As far as adding a new member. Oof. I will pray for you. Aline, what are your thoughts? So... My advice, and it's too late for all of us, but my advice is to be the person in the relationship who cares least about the HomeKit stuff, because then you don't have to deal with it. Like we've got a bunch of HomeKit.
stuff and a bunch of HomeKit devices. And I don't deal with any of it because it is so infuriating. And I do not have a great tolerance for the fiddliness of it. I feel for my husband. Because we have moved, we're about to embark upon our fifth move in seven years. And so he's going to have to do all of this all over again. I don't touch it because it is so frustrating. So I, my deepest sympathy guy, because.
I can't deal with it at all. It's just so frustrating. I'm trying to think. It's been a while. I've moved. physical locations with the same home i'm pretty sure i'm trying to think now because we our old apartment was across the street i know and i like i feel like the radio still work was it just like the light just moved it piecemeal right because all the infrastructure moved with me.
And I don't recall having a significant problem with that. And my wife also has an account on there. I've never tried adding... My kid does not have any devices. He's not old enough. So I've never had to deal with that. I do find HomeKit, as Mike has said, it's gotten better in some... places but in other places
it is still just wonky, especially because most of us don't replace all of our home devices. So though they've added thread radios and matter and all that stuff, many of us still have legacy devices that have not been updated with any of those features. And so you're kind of... stuck. You have maybe multiple hubs. That's my biggest frustration as I have all those hubs that need to be hardwired to my Ethernet port somewhere so that they can talk to my lights or whatever.
Yeah, so it's getting better, but I'm sad to say, I think I probably agree with Mike on this one, that you got to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. So just to wrap this up, because I have a tip, because I... Figure something out. I did. I ended up nuking my home. Not physically, but, you know. Bold move. And I rebuilt it all. I rebuilt it all. And then I was like, okay, well, this Apple TV that we have here, I want that.
to be another home hub. I want that on the network so that it can control stuff with the little home icon, which is a nice feature that they added. Turns out... If you want your Apple TV to be on your home, the default user on the Apple TV must be the same as the owner of the home. And so since Amanda is the owner of the TV, it can't be, it can't iCloudy do it.
to HomeKit as the owner or display it. And if we change it from her being the default owner to me being the default owner, photos will depopulate all of her photos and use mine. A completely unrelated thing that is like, I mean, it has to do with the way Apple TV works, but it is a bananas expectation. Anyway, if you can't see your Apple TV, it could be because you're not the default iCloud account on the device.
That's two topics down, two topics left to go here on Clockwise, which of course means it's halftime. And this week's episode is brought to you by 1Password. If you're a security or IT professional, you've got a mountain of assets to protect devices, identities, and applications. It's a lot and it can create a mountain of security risks. Fortunately, you can conquer that mountain of security risks with 1Password Extended Access Management.
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Learn more at 1password.com slash clockwise. That's 1password.com slash clockwise, all lowercase. Our thanks to 1password for their support of this show and Relay. And with that, halftime is over, and I turn it over to Micah Sargent.
¶ Cooking with Modern Technology
I just was curious, do you use tech when you are following a recipe, when you're making food of some sort? Tell us about your food making process. If it does involve tech, if it doesn't. Then also tell us about your food making process. Aline, we'll start with you.
Bold of you to assume I cook because I don't really. But when I do, when I have in the past, I typically just pull up a recipe on my phone and use it. At one point I had... aspirations of getting a cabinet mount into which I could put my iPad and set the screen to not sleep while I was using it. That never actually came to pass because the stand or the thing we got had to screw into the cabinet. I didn't want to do that. And like it was a whole thing. But yeah, I just I use my phone or.
And this is really weird for me, but I will print out a recipe on paper so I can annotate it really easily. But yeah, I don't cook much. I eat a lot of yogurt. I do probably a little more than half the cooking in the house. And for stuff where I do need a recipe that I'm following, I do tend to use my... phone i have a stand that a company shipped me as like a part of like some promo swag for something it's just like a little wood
you know, block with a notch in it. And I usually, if I think about it, and I can find it because my child has not repurposed it as a makeshift train or something, I will put my phone in that so I can look at it as I go.
I don't tend to, I mean, I use a HomePod for timers and stuff, but I don't tend to use much else. I mean, if there are a few recipes, I will say I have cookbooks and I do sometimes use the recipes in those. Haven't you tried cooking in the Vision Pro? Don't think it would be a good idea. Could be weird. Anyway, yeah, that's where I am. Guy, I know you do some cooking. You're a culinary master. What do you got? I do a lot of cooking. I think, you know...
While cooking, typically timers, like I was just explaining, I don't often have a recipe in front of me. What I've often done is during the pandemic, Amanda... convinced me that YouTube is not just frenetic and nonsense. And I started watching a whole bunch of YouTube cooking content of which there is tons. So I've, I kind of watch.
Three, four different people make the thing that I'm trying to watch, get a sense of what's involved, and then just wing it, basically, based on that. I've ruined more meals. Getting to the point where I'm comfortable enough to be able to just wing it. So that's maybe why I don't use it that much. And also, Dan, like you were saying, it's difficult to scroll and pay attention to a recipe. And also, for me, it's a relaxation thing.
to cook and following a recipe and being stressed about how much of each little ingredient I'm going to put in stresses me out. And that kind of takes the fun away from it for me. So I am getting more. regimented in the way that I make food because, you know, I'm cooking for, you know, 10 year old, my 10 year old daughter and my wife. So when I say I'm going to give them something, it should probably taste vaguely like it did last time and not be completely randomly.
out of left field. But yeah, so basically no technology other than just feeling the force and having it work through me. I typically am a person who likes to have a physical paper recipe in front of me. And I said, you know what? I'm going to try something different. I want to use this iPad that I never use for something. And I had this 12 South iPad mount that you could sort of.
It has a little clamp on it. You can clamp it to the side of a table and it lifts the iPad up into the air and it's really nice and it can kind of hover over the top of the table so you can really easily see the recipe. But it was broken. And so I... opened up some CAD software and designed the little...
friction bracket and printed it. And it actually worked. And I was very excited. So I was able to kind of reform the ball joint. And I used it a couple of nights ago. German chocolate cake is my favorite. So I made one and I used the iPad instead of a physical recipe. And it's like, oh, this actually this can be done. It's fine. And it was nice to have the timers built in and that kind of a thing and be able to. uh sort of
I think, focus a little bit more on the steps, whereas with a piece of paper, you're kind of going back over and over again. So most of the time, the tech that I'm using to follow a recipe is, as I mentioned during Dan's topic, just timers on my Apple Watch. But this time it was a hovering iPad that helped me to follow along.
¶ Debating Household Humanoid Robots
Thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our next topic, which comes from Aline. If Aline wrote this and not Aline's robot. Oh, my gosh. Maybe it was my robot. We'll talk about that. 1x Technologies just announced the Neo. which they are calling, and I quote, A safe humanoid robot that does your chores and offers personalized assistance. And you can buy it for a mere $20,000. Their promotional video shows this blank-faced robot.
wearing like this knitted suit. And it's got two vacant looking eyes, which are actually cameras. And it's just kind of awkwardly moving. You can tell by the way I'm framing this question, my bias. It's like awkwardly moving around this space, doing household chores, like tidying rooms, you know, putting blankets in a basket and cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry. So I'm wondering what your take is on this.
technology. All right. I get it. We all grew up watching the Jetsons and seeing Rosie make food for everybody and clean the house. And we were like... robots, they can do all this stuff that we don't want to do. And the answer is maybe someday, but I'm not optimistic that this is happening anytime soon.
Given all our experiences that we've talked about with voice assistants and how bad they are at understanding requests, something that also has mobility and any degree of autonomy behind it feels... extra questionable. You get home and find that it's, I don't know, scrubbed the toilet with your cat or something. Why did you... I thought that's what you said. So I am not... data this is not right you know this is not a humanoid uh android that is that is capable of flying a starship uh this is a
gimmick that I think probably they're like, once enough people give us $20,000, we'll have the money to build them or something. I don't know. I'm not optimistic. This seems like vaporware to me, but maybe I'm wrong. Guy, lover of all things robot. What do you got? Wow. I mean, you date one C-3PO knockoff. It is kind of creepy. Joanna does a wonderful job. She's a very funny human being.
And kind of sort of lovingly makes fun of it. Because I don't even think it rises to the level of like, this is a horrible idea. It's more like this is obviously a janky kind of weird hack. Specifically, you allowing... a remote operated robot into your home will allow them to gather the information such that they can make their remote operated robot work better without having some dude poking his eyeballs through cameras.
As much as people sort of say the Apple Vision Pro, maybe a little early, this is like prehistoric. This is insane that anybody would try to ship this thing. I think it's a bad idea. I think there's no there there. There is some telepressing stuff that's kind of interesting. If you were extracting... you know, depleted uranium rods from a nuclear reactor, this would probably be great. I'm so confused. Yeah. I mean, it's not like as a principle, like, you know, remotely operated.
mech is not a horrible idea to there's you know cases where human beings could get killed but anyway it's a i think it's a bad idea too early and i do recommend you go watch that video because it is entertaining uh But I don't even think it rises to the level of being horrified of the deployment of this technology yet. I just think it's a horrible, bad idea. So, yeah, I know there are the little...
floor vacuum robots that they're making now that have like an arm. I already have nightmares thinking about. Someone having one of those and they come home and they find that the robot thought that their dog or cat's cute little white pole was a sock on the floor. and have you know lovingly removed it from the pet and so the thought that you would have this full size uh yeah i know it's not as as you've mentioned like it's it's so
Non-functional, really. Yeah, that it's it's not really to the point of horror, but like I wouldn't drive a car inside of my house. I wouldn't put a crane. Well, maybe I would put a crane in my home if I could. But the point is, like, this heavy, dangerous machinery, it's still so far off from making sense to me inside of a home. But you show me something that is folding my laundry.
and putting it away for me. And I could be convinced of a lot. I'm not going to like you. I would love to have that. So I would just keep my...
My pet's in a tiny home next door and in the main home has the robot in it that does my laundry. Wait, do you also live in the tiny home? Is the house just for the robot? The house is just for the robot and my laundry, yes. I'm really well... i can do that oh man uh yeah that podcasting ads are paying for all of it um i mean if anything introduced itself as i'm safe
My name is Guy English. You would not think I was safe. It shouldn't be the first thing out of your mouth. So, yeah, those are my thoughts. Do my laundry for me. And I could be convinced of a lot is really what we're walking away with. Aline, why don't you write this out here? So I grew up watching a lot of science fiction.
um as did apparently the founder of the firm that created this because in their promotional video he was talking about like i grew up with like rosie the robot and data helping humanity and blah blah and i was like okay but you also grew up with the terminator and in star trek you grew up with lore who was like malevolent data and you grew up with you know like there are so many examples in science fiction of technology turning on its creators that it just like completely not a factor i guess
But like more than anything, I think about the future factor and the human factor. And what I mean by the future factor is like, where is this technology going to be? Like, what are we going to do with those? The same thing with AI. generative AI like what are people going to do with this and it's like oh well they're going to create deep fakes of celebrities doing things that celebrities don't want video for and they're going to you know
show just like terrible stuff. Like people are awful. Like people are awful. I love humans and also we're terrible. And so I think about what, what are people going to use that for? And it is a. set of cameras with opposable thumbs and mobility walking around your house controlled by somebody. probably in a data center working for whatever the minimum wage is in the cheapest country that they could find labor for. And that's the human factor that concerns me. And I just, I wish.
You know, Jurassic Park, your scientists were so preoccupied with what is the quote was so preoccupied with finding out if they could, they didn't think about if they should. And that is technology for me now. Technology for me now is why are we doing this? You should not be doing this. We should not be exploring this, at least not with the way that humanity is currently. And I don't know, I've got...
I think that it's like a funny thing to watch the video and kind of see it bumbling around. And I think it's really thought-provoking, but it also really concerns me for, you know, not the next five years, but the next 30.
years what is this technology going to do and what is it going to be like and how is it going to be sorry to have a conspiracy theory hat but how is it going to be used against us because that's where we are right now in society at least in the u.s i don't know And I think we shouldn't see that as conspiracy theory hat.
That is just someone asking the questions that need to be asked instead of doing things like saying, it is my duty to put out a chatbot regardless of the fact that it might encourage suicide. behavior in people and no, we're not going to shut this down and stop working on it and work on it until it doesn't do that anymore. Instead, what we're going to do is over the course of the next year, roll out safety protections while we continue to make.
Make it available to people. Let's be clear. That's the wrong way of doing it. Let's be clear. Move fast and break things was not a good strategy, but move fast and break people is even worse. Yep. Amen. All right.
¶ Favorite Halloween Treats and Farewell
That is four topics done and dusted like a vampire with a stake through its heart. We got just enough time for a bonus topic. Before we get there, I'll remind you, get all your favorite clockwise swag over at clockwise dot social hats, T-shirts, mugs. phone cases, stickers. We got it all. Help support the show. We really appreciate it. Clockwise.social. All right. Best Halloween candy. Go, Guy. Mini Mars bars.
Almond Joy and Mounds because no one else wanted to eat them and I love them. Milk Duds, I guess. I gotta go with a Junior Mints or Peppermint Patties if you got them. that's the stuff also stuff for me uh all right
That is the end of this week's show. Before we say goodbye, I want to remind you, you can also check out Clockwise Unwound, which is a short weekly segment after the main show wraps up where Mike and I chat about a tech topic. If you want to get that, plus ad-free episodes, go to relay.fm slash clockwise.
Sign up for just $7 per month or $70 a year, and you will help support this very show. And with that, we have reached the end, and I would like to thank our fantastic guest this week. Guy English, thank you so much for joining us. It's a lot of fun. And Aline Sims, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me on. And Micah, we'll be back next week. It will no longer be spooky season. Alas, we'll have to move into...
November and come up with a new shtick. But I'm sure we'll think of something. Until then, we remind everyone out there listening, watch what you say. And keep watching that spooky clock. before it chimes midnight.