630: Extreme Forms of Liquid Glass

It's time for episode 630 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, November 5th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast that's got more layers than your winter coat. 30, to be precise. I'm one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, and I am joined across the internet by my dear pal.

My wonderful friend, it is Dan, the man, Morin. How you doing, Dan? I'm doing well, Micah. My winter coat has only 29 layers. I am slowly suffocating. Oh, I don't know what happened to the 30th one, but... I shedded it. I just that one. It's gone like a snake. Why don't we? Oh, I forgot. You don't like this. I'm sorry. I forgive me. Forgive me. Let's let's introduce our wonderful guests.

To my left, producer, reporter at the Texas Standard, host of the Lions Towers and Shields podcast and author of iOS Access for All. It is the Shelly Brisbane. Welcome back to the show, Shelly. Thanks, Micah. I don't know this word winter of which you speak. Could you define that for me? I'm from Texas. What do I know? And to my left this week is a senior developer advocate at GitHub and the one and only original film girl. accept no substitutes. Christina Warren. Welcome back, Christina.

Hey, happy to be here. Happy to be here. All right. We have four topics, but just 30 minutes, so we better get going. My topic for you is this. In light of the Amazon versus perplexity drama where Amazon said, um, no, I don't want you.

letting your AI buy things from our store. I just want to know if you've used any of the agentic features of generative AI to complete tasks on your behalf. And if you have, can you tell us about your experience? If you haven't, what keeps you from doing so? Shelley, we'll start with you. I have not. And honestly, it has to do with my thoughts about AI in general is that I need to.

tackle one AI type of task at a time. And I haven't gotten to the agentic stuff because my brain has just not wrapped itself around the idea. of asking AI to go out and do a task for me and come back and tell me the result. And I'm sure I will get to it eventually, but I really have not felt a particular urgency about doing all the things that AI says I can do. It's just not that important in my life yet.

And maybe it should have been to answer this question, but not so far. I got a lot of thoughts here. All right, let's start with this one. Perplexity is doing something shady. There's gambling going on in this establishment. I am not surprised at all. But that said, the second thought I had was... and Amazon doesn't want them to do it, let them fight. I don't particularly like either of these companies, so they can do whatever they need to do. But...

To take sort of where Shelley left off and like take it a step further and set aside the general AI thoughts, the agentic thing, while I admit that there is some appeal to like things you don't want to do and you could just dispatch an AI to go do them and it would come back. and give you the results, and you'd be all set. It sounds nice in theory, except for a few things. One, I don't trust AI.

come back with actual results. It's like, you know, book me a trip to Paris, you know, for these times. And it comes back. It's like Paris, Texas. I mean, maybe I could go and see Shelly. But like, you know, I don't think... I really have that kind of trust and belief that AI is going to do the thing that I want it to do, especially given all the ways I've seen it behave in other contexts.

And then the other part of it, which I think is more a fundamental problem, is a lot of the tasks they talk about are not things that I want to trust an AI with, not just on the trust side, but it's not things I want an AI to do for me. I have no desire to have an AI shop for me. If it's something I want to buy, I'm going to do the research myself.

I think maybe that's self-selected a bit in that we are all people who are perhaps more savvy about some of these things and think more through our buying decisions than maybe the average person. But that's a thing that I like. Similarly, this is the issue with the... CatGPT browser, I don't really want a browser intermediating itself or an AI intermediating itself between me and the web because it's like asking an agent to do something that you enjoy in some way or a thing that you want to do.

I don't know. I just find it harder to do that. I think about my wife loves making travel plans and loves figuring out flights and all that. She just enjoys doing it. She was a consultant for a long time. It's one of her happy places. I think she would be profoundly disappointed.

trying to get an AI to do it. And I think she'd be upset with the results because she didn't get a chance to really look at all the options. So maybe for some people it appeals, but for me, not so much. Christina, what about you? Yeah. So it's interesting because I fully relate to exactly what you're saying, Dan. I think that sometimes these agentic tools, and I have used them and I'll talk.

more about my experiences, I think that at least the state that they are right now in the perplexity sense and booking a flight for you and doing... And that sort of stuff for you, since that they're showing off in a lot of these browsers, I think that the results are either A, too slow. They can take a really long time if they do accomplish what they're going to accomplish and they don't always. So that's piece number one.

really slow. Number two, to your point, like I also have an issue with, I guess, like the trust factor. Am I going to trust that this is going to do as good of a job as I would for a task like, you know, buying something or planning a trip or getting a flight set up?

And like your Wi-Fi, I enjoy that aspect of travel planning as well. That said, there are plenty of tasks that I would be very happy to offload to AI, to an assistant, to anyone, as long as I had trust that it would be done the way that I would want it to be done.

We're not quite there yet, I think, for some of the agentic tasks in browsers. And I'm personally not at the point where I would trust something with my credit card where I'm like, yes, I will authorize you to make purchases on my behalf. I'm not at that point yet. But I do use agentic things for coding tasks and for some other types of, you know, more like, you know, skill-based tasks to either summarize things or to, you know, just create, you know, programs or run.

long like sorts of actions and whatnot. And then, yeah, you need to go back and you need to verify if what was done was correct or what was not done correctly. But I'm happy to do that. I think we all are on the same page. I've used some of these agentic tools just to test them. And like Christina was saying, they take so long to get things done.

I remember back when Amazon, before we were doing generative AI, but Amazon was like, use your Echo to order things. And I specifically, it was a Prime Day. they said, if you order this dog toy using your voice, then you get like five bucks off or something. And so I did it. It came in the mail and it was larger than one of my dogs. And I didn't realize. And I thought if I had gone online and read the description and paid a little bit more of it.

more attention, I probably would have realized that it was a small toy and not, I mean, that it was a large toy, not a small toy, like I wanted it to be. And those kinds of things, even back then made me a little bit iffy about letting something just do it on my behalf. And I'm still very much that way when it comes to buying things or these more in-depth tasks. Yeah, I would I don't want it to be my travel agent. I would let it find.

prices for me, but not actually book the travel because then that's whenever, yes, you end up in a place that you weren't expecting to go. So I'm still pretty iffy about it as well. It sounds like you all are too.

All right, let's move on to our next topic, which comes from Shelly. So over at sixcolors.com, I wanted to find out how different regular iPhone users versus Six Colors readers were in terms of the way they acquire iPhones, how they do it, why they do it, when they do it, all that sort of thing. So I conducted a little survey.

And one of the most interesting findings or stats from that survey... was that folks who are, quote, regular users, the civilian cohort of newsroom colleagues of mine and cousins on Facebook, various people who are not iPhone tech nerds, those folks were much more likely than Six Colors readers to... use some sort of Apple upgrade or carrier-based program to buy their phones, whether they buy a phone every year or periodically.

either to get a discount or for the convenience factor. And so my question for you is, do you use any sort of upgrade or discount program? And has it changed over time? You know what? First of all, it was a great piece. You should all go read it at SixColors.com. Second of all, I'm the weird outlier, I guess, there, which is that as a sort of Six Colors community member...

I do use a program to buy a phone. I use the iPhone upgrade program and have since it started, which is now, I don't even remember. Is it probably close to 10 years old, if not more? And the reason is because as somebody who writes about this stuff, I find it's helpful to get a new phone every year. And yes, I'm also a nerd and I like getting a new phone every year. You know, I think one of the reasons I opted for Apple's program and previous to that, I was lucky enough, I think.

For most of the time, I was employed as an editor at Macworld. Macworld would buy a new phone for me. And then I was doing it on my own. I think I maybe did trade-ins a couple of years before the upgrade program started. For me, it's the simplicity of having one point of contact to deal with. Yes, the loans are facilitated by a separate company, in this case, citizens. But being able to interface directly with Apple for that makes my life easier.

not having to worry about selling my phone or trade it in directly. Like I kind of know what I'm going to get. I think also makes it easier and it makes it simpler to just have a cost that is static. pretty much with occasional... This year, my cost went up a little bit because they raised the price on the phone models for the Pro model. But other than that, it's pretty straightforward. I don't...

I don't like my carrier. I don't like any of the carriers. You deal with them because they're kind of a necessity, but I don't want to be beholden to them, which I think is the reason I don't do any of the... The programs that seem more attractive, I'm just always wary of...

gotchas or hidden catches or whatever. And so I feel like at least with Apple, my experience has been pretty straightforward in terms of like, here's the phone, you know, take it back and I'll get a new one and everything goes pretty smoothly. So for me, that has proved to be a... the right balance of saving some money and being able to upgrade and not having to worry about strings being attached. Christina, what about you?

Yeah, I mean, so my situation almost exactly mirrors yours. I also do the iPhone upgrade program every year. And I have for the last, I don't know, probably, you know, three or four years. I've also, I have just bought the phones outright and then traded them in. But to your point, it got to a certain point I looked at it. I did that for many years. And if I didn't have an employer buy one for me, and I got to the point I was like, I'm literally trading this in every year.

I should just get on an official upgrade program. And so I did. And I've shifted, similar to you, I shifted away from the carrier program to the Apple program. On the off chance that I was like, well, I might actually change my carrier because I'm like you. I don't really have any affinity for them. Having said that, changing your carrier is a giant pain, and I don't think I'm ever going to.

How it used to work was that every other year I would hand a phone down to my husband. And so I would buy the new phone and then some years I would trade it in. And then some years I would, you know, maybe. maybe pass it off. So I just buy it outright and just keep it for an extra year as a secondary phone and then pass it off to him or something. So what we did, though, three years ago is Verizon had a deal where you could trade in the phone.

And it could be up to a certain vintage. And at that point, I think I had a really old phone lying around and they would give you basically the amount of the new phone if you, you know, if they over credits over a three year period of time.

And I was like, okay, well, they're basically just going to pay us for this old phone, then great. And it was a similar thing this year where he had an iPhone 14 and was able to get an iPhone 17. It would have been free. He decided to go for a Pro. So I think it added. you know, three or $4 a month to our bill. And then I cut them down to a different plan. So that actually didn't end up going up at all. So yeah, I'm a mix of both, right? Like I personally do the...

annual iPhone upgrade plan. And then my husband does do the carrier plan. Yeah, I do a mix of the plans and I'm happy to because I upgrade every year. I started with the AT&T upgrade. plan, whatever it was called. And then I think I did one year of the iPhone upgrade program before I started working somewhere where they would buy the phone for me. And so that's been the way that I've done it every year is trade in the old phone, get a new one and just buy it outright. However.

If I was paying for it myself, I would definitely be doing the iPhone upgrade program as opposed to just buying it outright. So, yeah, I think I'd be right along with with Dan and Christine on that. But Shelly, I'm curious to hear about your experience. Yeah, I don't upgrade phones every year, which is probably the...

Primary reason I use a carrier plan, don't love carriers as a rule, and also the complexity of figuring out what's a good deal and what isn't, especially if you're upgrading every two years or three years or whatever that might be, and I have my husband's. phone to deal with as well. I used to hand my phone down to him and last for the 16 cycle, we both bought new phones through our carrier. And so...

I don't like the idea of reselling. It's just it's complicated. I'm happy to trade it in at the end. get something of a deal and then get the new phone whenever I'm ready for it. And if Apple made it possible for me to do that on a multi-year cycle, I probably would because I cannot bring myself to upgrade every year. It just feels, for me personally, wasteful. I just I can't do it. So I don't do it. However, I discovered an interesting wrinkle this year. I don't travel internationally a lot.

But this year we were going to the UK and I was going to get a SIM card to use while traveling. And I checked the T-Mobile, which is my carrier price for that. And I checked independent SIM cards and I actually bought another services, a service.

And I got a really good deal on a SIM card. And the day before my trip, I tried to activate it and I found that I could not do it. And when I called T-Mobile, they said, oh, yeah, because you're still paying off this phone, you are locked to us. I had no idea that was a thing. really changed my perspective on upgrades through T-Mobile. And as somebody who is not going to pay for a phone outright, I

just don't have $1,000 or $2,000 if both of us are upgrading, lying around for that purpose. I feel a little stuck, but I'm having to rethink given that experience. All right. Well, we have reached halftime here on Clockwise, and this is where I remind you all about our swag. If you head to clockwise.social, you can check out our hat, our tote, our shirt.

our sticker, and so much more. We'd love it if you checked out our swag when you buy clockwise gear. You help support the work that we do here on the show. but you are also helping to make sure that we can continue to pay the Zoom bill. So we appreciate it. Clockwise.social to check out our swag. All right, we are back from halftime, and that means it's time for Dan's topic.

All right, iOS 26.1 just came out. We'll talk more about that in a minute, but iOS 26.2 is now in beta, and it brings a lot of new features to Apple's podcast app, including automatic chapter detection, inline links to other Apple services, and even links to other podcasts.

Now, this is a panel full of people who do a lot of podcasts. My question is, do these features appeal to you as a podcast creator and or as a podcast listener? Or are these things just a way to keep people in Apple's ecosystem? Christina, we'll start with you.

Yeah. So it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a great way to kind of frame the question. I mean, ultimately, I do think that this is a way to try to keep people in the Apple ecosystem. And I think that these are nice additions to have. And I'm glad to see Apple. seeming to finally start to kind of invest in podcasts again, even if it maybe isn't the way that I would want it to be invested. And I'm glad to see that they at least remember that this is a thing and that they...

essentially gave the market away to both Spotify and YouTube. Will I use these features? Well, here's the truth. I've used Overcast for so long, I don't use Apple Podcasts. So it's great that these features are there, especially if they work. And I think that having automatic chapter detection, if it can work well. can be a good thing. Spotify has a similar feature. YouTube has a similar feature. And that can certainly be nice in terms of just trying to find...

certain midpoints. And I also feel like it could be very nice to have links to other podcasts if they're reliable. This is always a big if when it comes to any of the Apple intelligence types of features. I don't know. I can't help but be a little bit cynical and just look at this and be like, okay, yeah, great. You're adding things that a lot of other podcast platforms have had for a really long time. Yay.

Any sort of automatic linking I think is cool. Again, though, as we talked about the agentic stuff, if it works and if it's not popping in links that aren't real, especially the podcast's part. It won't affect us as much. But the idea that, you know, you talk about another podcast on your show, I think it's great that that other podcast would be linked. Of course, all this is opt out. You can choose to not use these features if you don't want to as an Apple podcast creator. I.

Also, do not listen via Apple Podcasts. I am and have been for a long time a Pocket Casts user. And so those features will not be something that I see very often. And ultimately, in your question of. Is this, you know, about appeal? Is this about keeping people in the Apple ecosystem? I think that it is both and that's okay. I'm glad that Apple is doing.

Automatic podcast transcription for both search and accessibility reasons. And to take that and do more with it to act on a little bit more, I think is great. Chapter detection. Fantastic. particularly for the neurodivergent among us. So all good there. Shelley, what are your thoughts? I think Apple really had to do this and probably will have to do more because they've ceded so much ground to Spotify and YouTube, which is astonishing because of how long Apple podcast.

writ large, not the app, but Apple Podcasts itself sort of had so much mindshare and that Spotify and YouTube have just really taken over. And so... Beyond Apple as a podcast client, they really have to do something, even though they're the default software on the platforms, they have to make a compelling case for why you would use Apple as opposed to Spotify or YouTube, if that's your thing. That said, I'm also...

So an Overcast user probably won't change as a consumer. Although when I knew we were going to talk about that this morning, I did open up Apple Podcasts and iOS. 26.2, just to sort of remind myself. I appreciated it. I think it's a good...

Good looking client. I love the transcript thing, which I had forgotten about it. That's a far more compelling feature and it's been around for more than a year than these new things are. And so I think for anybody who values transcripts and transcript integration while you're listening.

Apple Podcasts is absolutely something worth considering, and it's such a great feature. But is it intended to keep you in the Apple ecosystem? Sure. Will it make me link to Apple News or books or anything like that? No, probably not. But it feels like they had to do this.

This sort of collectively has hit the nail on the head. I agree with Micah's point. Why not both? You know, I think it is probably a little bit of this, a little bit of that. The Link thing, I think, would be more powerful if it were beyond... just Apple's own stuff, but I'm not sure if I have looked at some of the documentation on this. I think some of it can be done manually if you...

Timecode 7 will provide your own links, but I'm not sure how much of it requires that it be links to other things in Apple's ecosystem. Certainly for some of the things it is. For the podcasts, obviously, yeah, they're trying to keep you in there. I do appreciate that it could be used to cross-promote podcasts and make that...

very easy for people to jump around and discover new podcasts without being like, oh, what was that thing they were talking about? And I forgot. I think there's a convenience to that. And I think that the chapter feature in particular is a really nice one because...

I have definitely ended up with scenarios where it's like, oh, they were talking about this, but it's a two-hour podcast. How am I ever going to find that section again? Transcripts help that a lot too. I think that's been a big feature of podcasts, as Shelly mentioned. I am a podcast user. Some of the shows...

I listen to put their own chapters in, like our show. Our show puts its own chapters in because we have very convenient dividing lines, and this won't change anything about that. But I think adding the ability for that to happen elsewhere for shows that aren't necessarily doing it manually... I think it's just something that takes pressure off. But to all of your points, I think it is a good point that like...

Apple did have the de facto podcasting platform, and that is no longer the case, or at least it's certainly no longer the case that they are as dominant as they used to be. And so they have to be more competitive. They have to start working on new features. And I hope, to Christina's point, that they do more of some of the other features that maybe we'd like to see as podcast creators. But I guess we'll see.

Thank you for your thoughts on that. Let's go to our final topic, which comes from Christina.

Okay, so we just talked about iOS 26.2, but iOS and actually all the 26.1 versions of macOS, iOS and iPadOS are now out. So my question for the panel is, will you be turning off? liquid glass. That feature has been controversial amongst a lot of users. And so I'm curious if any of you will be turning it off slash toning it down. There's not technically a way to turn it off, but there is a way to kind of choose, I guess, your level of transparency.

I'm curious if you will be doing that on any platforms and if so, which ones? I am fond of the look of liquid glass. I know that's a little controversial, but I am. And I don't. I don't have the one version on that's like super clear already that where you can change the icons where it's just like fully glass, fully transparent nonsense. I like how it looks right now. I like the translucency in its current.

form. I'm going to keep it on macOS how it is, on iPadOS, on iOS how it is. Yeah, it's fine. Shelly, I'd love to hear your thoughts. As you might imagine, I do have thoughts. First of all, it's important to point out that using the new display and contrast option to have clear or tinted...

liquid glass is not turning it off. It is downplaying. It is making them less translucent if you use the tinted versus clear option. But I think it's a mistake to tell people that it's turning it off. So that's just my PSA for the moment. Also, I've explored this feature. opposed to the various accessibility features, reduced transparency and increased contrast and the dark mode. In terms of how you combine them for your own personal use, I think it's really about...

playing with them and finding that right combination. Because I can't tell you, go and turn on reduced transparency or turn on this tinted option and one of the others will suit you. Because in my personal case, what I'm doing is living in darkness.

mode with increased contrast setting on. And frankly, the clear or tinted setting in the general display and contrast option doesn't make that much difference for me personally. It makes most difference in things like notification and to a lesser extent.

But in dark mode, it really doesn't make all that much difference at all. But my bottom line is you're going to have to experiment with it as an individual, especially if you have any sort of visual disability and especially if you have already made choices about. things like wallpaper that might make it less necessary to make that change. Yeah, I turned this on just to try it out when I updated to the 26.1 beta earlier in the month. And on my Mac, I could not tell the difference.

It is very apparent on some of the places, like as Shelley mentioned, notifications. I do find it makes them much more legible if less eye-catching. I can say that the totally clear notifications were, I thought... Very difficult to read. So, you know, again, to Shelley's point, I'm not sure that you would say this is turning things off exactly. it's an odd choice. It's an odd choice to walk it back quite that much. And it makes me think that when 27 runs around next year,

We might see a more substantial overhaul with some stuff that they've learned. And I do appreciate that they seem dedicated to keep playing with this and trying to find ways to make people more. pleased with the design just because it clearly has been something where people have strong feelings about it and it does have some impacts on people. So I'm glad that they haven't just been like, everything's great and we're never going to play with this again.

Really worked a lot, including even during the beta period over the summer, as well as with some of these newer versions. So it will be interesting to see how that continues to evolve through future point releases. But right now... I've got it on on some devices untinted and some devices unclear just to sort of, I guess, mess with my own head, but also just see if I like one of them better than the other. Christina, why don't you wrap us up here?

My take on this is I got to the point where I don't mind it on iOS and iPadOS. There are parts on macOS where I realize that the transparency isn't as heavy handed as it was on the other platforms. Thank goodness. I still, there are aspects of it I don't like, you know, I've played with the tinted option. I don't know if I'm going to be toggling that or not. Um, similarly based on kind of the way I've set things up myself. That said.

I'm very happy about this because I don't believe that my parents have upgraded to iOS 26 yet. And I've been really dreading that. And especially I've been dreading my mom updating to macOS 26.

for these reasons, because they're older. And I still feel like at a fundamental level, this was something that was like, did you even consider that people with older eyes or with, you know, vision impairments might be looking at some of these effects, right? I still feel like the answer to that was no. Because it can be very difficult to see certain things, especially depending on the first betas, especially with how just purely transparent things were.

And I still don't feel like that tradeoff for an effect that really does seem straight out of 2006 was necessarily worth it. I'm sorry. Look, it's Windows Vista. I mean, it's slightly better. And that wasn't a good thing. We made fun of it then. I'm going to continue to make fun of it now. I'm sorry. Shots fired. But I'm glad that there are more options to dial it in. And I'm primarily glad that when I see my parents at Thanksgiving and we'll be upgrading their systems that.

I will hopefully have to deal with less tech complaints about how terrible iOS looks now because it's hard for them to see things. We have just about reached the end of this episode of Clockwise, but we've got enough time for a bonus topic.

I want to ask all of you, you are given control over one of the canonical base elements. So that means earth, water, fire, air, which... are you choosing? And if Dan, if you say heart, I'm leaving the show. I was going to say heart. I was going to say heart. Shelley, we'll start with you.

I'm going to take water. Water is important. Also, the flow of water where it does and doesn't flow is important. You're not allowed to put poison in the water anymore of any kind. That's the end of the story. Water is my choice. My question was going to be, is this Planeteer rules or Avatar rules, Micah? If it's Planeteer rules, fire, obviously. If it's Avatar rules, air. I'm in for air. Christina?

Yeah, no, similarly, I was like, okay, what are the rules here? Yeah, if we're going planeteer rules, yeah, fire for sure. I mean, I think water is probably objectively the best choice, but come on, fire is fire. Fire is fire, that's right. It's pretty fun.

Given that in my mind, it's Avatar rules, I'm definitely going Earth. It's mostly just because I love Toph and King Bumi. And so it's Earth for me. So that's my answer. Thank you all for your answers on that topic. And thank you all for tuning in. you'd like to get ad free episodes with an extra unwound episode every week where dan and i chat well you can become a member of clockwise go to relay.fm clockwise sign up just seven dollars a month seventy dollars a year and you will help support

the show. With that, it is truly the end of this episode of Clockwise. So that means it's time to say goodbye to our awesome guests. Shelley Brisbane, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. And Christina Warren, thank you so much for joining us too. Great to be here. 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.