639: I'm Saying Words I Don't Really Know What They Mean

It's time for episode 639 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, January 14th, 2026. Clockwise for people, for tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast that is still writing 30 minutes in all of its spreadsheets. My name is Dan Morin, and I'm joined across the internet by my good friend, my pal, the one and only Micah Sargent. How are you doing today, Micah? I am doing well, Dan.

I love not reading what you write and just waiting for it to be heard because then the reactions are very real and very live. And that was a very real, very live reaction. It was very funny. That's good. It felt very disheartening for a moment. I just love not reading. what you write oh no anyway moving on yeah zing it's fine micah it's fine it's fine it's fine this is of course the show where we invite two fantastic guests talk about four tech topics we do it in just 30 minutes

To my left this week is a freelance consumer tech reporter whose work has been seen in so many places across the internet and who can be heard right here on Relay on Material. It is Florence Ion. Welcome back, Flo. Hello, if it makes you feel better, I never read what Andy puts in our show notes. I know Andy well, I'm guessing there's a lot. But live reaction. That's right, exactly.

And to my left, co-host of Primary Technology, it's Stephen Robles. Welcome back to the show, Stephen. Guten tag. Great to be here. All right. I'm going to kick things off with my topic.

Apple launched a subscription bundle of its Creative Pro apps and some other apps this week. I'm kind of curious if you think this is a good idea, if this is something you're interested in, or if you feel like... you know, how this sets it up to compete with... things from other vendors like Adobe and Affinity? Is app bundles the way of the future for these Creative Pro apps? Or is this just a terrible evolutionary dead end? Flo, what are your thoughts?

I don't want to turn this into a big rant, but, you know, when I saw this news hit yesterday, yesterday being Tuesday, we're recording this on a Wednesday, I realized that this felt like very much an answer to... the Creative Cloud price increases because it's something I've been personally navigating is there's no way for me to go back to like an older version of Adobe, anything to try and just have that be like.

the application that I use it's like everything is cloud-based now and I'm basically paying for the privilege of being able to use something versus owning something so I could see how this would be really helpful for people who maybe want to play around with what Apple offers in the Creative Suite, you know, the Creative Pro suite of apps.

You know, that's kind of the reason that Adobe started doing their thing was to make it easy for people to kind of come in and see what they were about. But I do, I do hope that they, you know. Stick to their users and let them, you know, I heard y'all can still buy it individually, so that's good at least. At least you guys have that. Asterisk. Yeah, that ultimately that's my hope is that the buying individually thing is still something that is possible in the future because I remember.

when I took my hard earned money and I threw it at a copy of Final Cut and then shortly after threw it at a copy of Motion and Compressor. And then from there, you know, bought the other apps that I needed. And from there, being able to use those tools and always have access to those tools set Apple's software apart from.

what you would get from Adobe, where I'm regularly having to, you know, reconcile with the fact that I'm paying what I'm paying every month for Adobe's suite and may or may not have to every six. months, every year, I can't remember now, go in and say, you know, I'm thinking about canceling if I can't keep this right, and then have it say,

Well, if you stick around, then we'll let you keep the rate for this much more time. Yeah. Adobe is the gingerbread man from Shrek in my mind. And then I say, fine. And then I do it. And then I have to go and do it again. the following year. That's annoying. And so I hope that they keep that going. But I also hope that the subscription bundle results in Apple.

paying more attention to these apps and adding more features to these apps than the company would otherwise. So in that way, I see the subscription as a positive. And as Flo has mentioned, the idea that maybe more people will get a chance to use them. is pretty cool as well. What are your thoughts, Stephen? Yeah, I think overall for the pro apps, it's good. One, because I was informed the one-time purchases are still good and you'll get all the new features that was announced yesterday.

So there's not really like a feature split between the subscription version of Final Cut Pro and the one-time purchase on a Mac. Now for the iPad, you know, I was already paying whatever, $5 a month or $6 a year for Final Cut on the iPad. So honestly, this is...

double that price, but then I get everything as a subscription is pretty wild. And especially for students, $3 a month for all of these apps, including Final Cut Pro and Logic is pretty wild. So for the education side, I think it's great.

When it comes to the iWork apps, that's where I'm a little more skeptical because that's where there's going to be feature separation between the free versions, which, I mean, they've always been free and they'll still be free with some features gated. So maybe it's not a...

Huge deal. But curious how many of the AI features you'll be able to do. The keynote features actually look awesome. Like being able to take a raw text outline and just tell keynote to make it into a presentation is wild. And all the editing features. but that will be part of the subscription as is the content hub, which is like high quality images and things like that. So overall, I'm very glad they kept the one-time purchase. I think pro users who hate subscriptions, you don't have to pay it.

And you're not missing out in the pro apps like Final Cut and Pixelmator Pro on the Mac. But remains to be seen the feature disparity when it comes to the iWork suite.

I'm kind of interested in the tactics of this decision. I mean, I think as Flo pointed out, there's some attempt to undercut Adobe here, even though those two companies have long been close allies. I think it's interesting, you know, Stephen mentioned the... the college education pricing. That is a steal. It is a steal. Thinking back to myself as a college student trying to get a copy of Photoshop.

Where was I going to get a copy of Photoshop? If you're lucky, your school might have a license or something like that. But even so, it was very expensive. It seems to me a very transparent opportunity there. for them to try and get the next generation of young people using their software and getting accustomed to their software so that when they go out in the real world, not only will they be customers of that software, but it will start to shift perhaps the industry.

and try to get more and more adoption within these various pro industries, which therefore just increases their market share for all of these apps. So I think that's a very savvy play right there. For me, I think the other question is how much cross-pollination is there between these various apps? Sure, as Mike pointed out, if you're someone using Final Cut, you might use Motion and Compressor because those things kind of make sense. Are you also likely to be a...

Customer for Logic. I don't know. Maybe. What about all those features for iWork? Very strange, as Stephen pointed out. I think it makes sense that they're still offering the individual purchase on the Mac because I would guess that most creators doing works with these apps are doing them on the Mac and not the iPad or the iPhone.

I'm sure there's some usage on the iOS sides, but I think the Macs are still the workhorses of a lot of these creative industries. That said, if you group them all together and it provides more opportunity for Apple to give these things attention and work on them, I think that's a plus. I too am worried about the features being gated. I don't think iWork has any business being in here. If it's one thing, if it's just content, but putting beta features in here...

That's very strange to me. I am somebody who uses numbers a lot. I use pages and keynote to a lesser degree. But the idea that I'd have to subscribe to the bundle to get access to those features that are still in beta feels very... So I'll be interested to see how that continues to develop and what the reactions to that are when this actually starts rolling out at the end of the month. Thank you all for your thoughts on that. Again, let's go to our second topic, which comes from Flow.

All right. So I got to tell you guys, I love my phone, but I hate my phone, especially especially right now. Like I am just having such a hard time logging off from it and not feeding. into the negative, you know, cause it's, it's where you find out everything. It's got everything on there, but like.

I really miss when life was just a little bit simpler, and I'm not trying to be that elder millennial that's like, I want to go back to the past, but I definitely, definitely want to go to a point where I am carrying around a device that is just kind of the singular use thing so that I... I'm not online all the time. So I'll tell you guys what I'm doing.

When we get to the end, I want to hear from you guys. Forget your smartphone. What piece of like archived single use tech are you bringing with you into 2026? I'm talking things like MP3 players, point and shoot cameras, that sort of thing. thing. I'm going with the point and shoot. One of my friends is a photographer, and he's kind of the only one in the group that's regularly bringing his camera around. And I said, I...

think we should go on a little photo walk because I have a camera that I just have in a box that I have not, you know, charged in a long time. And, you know, it'd be fun. So we did. And it was a delightful time. And like we spent the whole time just walking around Portland. And snapping photos and happened across this thing called the chicken window, which is where someone has pet chickens and they've carved out an area of their their like bushes.

Uh, and so you can look in and see the chickens and interact with them and they have the names of the chickens and it just like that just happened to happen while we're doing that. And so it was just a delightful experience that sort of like. kept you in the moment. And I think that point and shoot, like my phone stayed in my pocket, except whenever we were navigating to a new location. And that was quite a delight. Stephen, what about you?

I have given up on all these endeavors. I always want to try something. Like I got the Books Palma 2 Pro and I was like, this is going to be my weekend device where I'll e-read and listen to podcasts because you can install the Pocket Cast app on it. And the problem is it.

There's always a point in the day where I'm like, I can't do this one thing. And so I pick up my iPhone and then the day is over. And like, I've tried a variety of these devices over the years. I had the original light phone, which I think they're on like the light phone three now. And. you could do it. So I don't, I don't think I can try. I like the idea of maybe an iPod.

But like, I'm not going to keep a Mac around running OS 10 lion or something. So like if there was somehow a modern iPad that would just have the podcast app and I can like connect to the wifi and not have to like connect it to a computer to manage. I would almost try something like that. But as far as I know, there's not something like that exists. So I think it's over for me. I'm just too far gone. It's tough. I sympathize with that. I just before the end of last year, I picked up that.

Tiny e-reader, everybody was talking about the XTE Inc. X4, which in theory, magnets to the back of your iPhone. Spoiler, it doesn't really work with most iPhones. However, that said, I've really found myself intrigued by this device. It's a tiny, tiny little e-reader. It's even smaller than the book. It's like the size of the screen on the Books Palma. And it runs on an embedded ESP32 chip.

It's built-in firmware is terrible, but there's a really great open source replacement firmware that's like a drop-in and is actually pretty good. The biggest thing, and this has just made me annoyed about this day of the world all over again, is that I can't sync it with my e-books on other readers. So if I'm reading a book on my Kobo reader, which is what I usually read on before I go to bed at night.

because that stuff is linked to the Kobo. I can read it in the Kobo app on my phone or in theory, the Kobo app on a Books Palma, but this doesn't have any way of connecting to that and syncing my place in between them. So it makes it hard to use as a thing.

for doing all the reading the book I'm currently reading. I have toyed with considering putting just a different book on it and carrying it with me and then paralleling in two different books at the same time. I just mainly... I was so excited about the magnet possibility just because I felt like, oh, man, I want to set up a system where if I open social media for more than a couple minutes, my phone says, hey, turn it over and read a book.

And I can still do that, but it's certainly just another device to carry in at times that feels very onerous. Because I need my phone for so many things, I just can't. leave without my phone. It's kind of the tyranny of it, and I dislike it, but I'm still working on it. I haven't given up yet. I'm excited to keep playing with this e-reader and see if it can help me change any of my habits. That's us, Flo. What do you got? I think you've got some exciting stuff.

So I decided my big thing is that I needed to get away from it when it came to playing back music, especially because the last year I've been on a whole kick of like buying CDs and ripping them and like trying to rebuild my MP3 library, you know, divest it.

away from all of the streaming services, really own my music again. So I bought, I was going to mod and elder mp3 player which is like a whole thing now there's a whole world dedicated to people who are modding like old school samsung sony mp3 players from the 2000s the ipod obviously there's a whole market of

that. But I went and I bought a cheapy $35 MP3 player from Amazon. It's got FM radio on it and a voice recorder. And it also has little speakers, not that I need those. But the best thing about it is it has Bluetooth 5.0. And that was kind of like the big thing that I needed to make this switch because I needed that current gen Bluetooth connection going on so that it worked with all of my Bluetooth headphones. And so...

Now it's really nice just carrying this light little mp3 player in my pocket. It weighs nothing. And I just walk around the house, you know, and if I need to skip, I could just... Just double tap the little button. And it's just so nice. And it reminds me that, oh, that's right. I really do only have like 3,000 songs that cycle through. But I love them all. And that's what matters.

All right. That is 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 your favorite. clockwise swag that's right all the great merchandising that we offer here at clockwise you can find it clockwise.social we've got hats we've got shirts we've got phone cases we've got tote bags

We are replete with stuff more like than your local PBS affiliate. We've got it all. And the best part is when you buy swag from our little store, you help support the show. So once again, go to clockwise.social for the finest in clockwise merchandise. And we thank you for your support. And with that, halftime is over. And Mike, I'll turn things over to you.

Yeah, I'm just curious. How often do you find yourself reformatting or erasing and restoring your devices? Do you have an annual... ritual of doing so? Do you just do it when it's needed? Do you find that you don't really need to do it ever? Yeah. What's the current state of burn it all down and start fresh? Stephen, we will start with you.

I don't typically do this with any regularity. The one exception is my MacBook Air I use as like my test device. For things like earlier today, I installed an MCP server, I think. I don't really know what I'm doing with that, but I saw somewhere on threads that someone said, Claude on the Mac desktop can build shortcuts if you install this MCP server from GitHub. And I'm saying words, I don't really know what they mean.

Like I tried that kind of stuff on my MacBook air. And then after some months, I'm like, you know what? There's probably viruses on there or something. I don't really know. Probably not. But I just feel like, you know what? I want to clean slate on that. And so.

Every six-ish months, I'll take whatever laptop I'm using, I'll wipe it and start from scratch. But that's it. I don't do that with pretty much any other device. If I ever run a beta and then have to downgrade, I'll always restore from a backup, probably a local encrypted one.

I did before I did the beta update. So it's not something I do regularly. I would love to do this more. I'm struggling thinking about it because I'm thinking I've got my I'm recording this on my Mac mini, which is my office computer. Um, this is like a migration of a migration of a migration, probably going back like four or five different computers. Uh, maybe more. It is at times extremely janky, like things I'm using, you know, Steven, you'll sympathize. I'm using shortcuts and like.

I will just get beach balls like every two seconds when I'm using shortcuts. And I'm like, I don't know why. And so I sit myself thinking maybe I should wipe it all and start over. But there's also just so much stuff on here that I'm going to have to figure out how to set up all over again that I'm.

It makes me exhausted to think about it. I don't do that with my iPhone or my iPad. I did do it with my MacBook Air when I bought the M4 one last fall because part of the reason was I was short on space on the old one and I'd really tried to minimize it. I minimized my footprint on it. And so I felt like it was doable because I didn't keep that much stuff on it. And that went pretty well. But again, this migration to this computer here...

I don't know how old the oldest documents on it, but I would be shocked if they didn't go back for more than a decade. So I am too scared, I think is the answer, even though it would probably be good for me. Maybe something bad will happen and I'll have to do it. Is that a thing I should hope for? No. Flo, what about you?

Oh, my God, you guys, I realized that I haven't done this since I bought this laptop in 2021. And, you know, like Andy and I were having some recording problems. And so I was like, I need I need to just do. holy race. And so I tried to back everything up to OneDrive, which was really, really not the smartest move. And I knew not to do this because I've already fallen into this trap before with OneDrive. But you know me, I'm a Windows user. So sometimes...

i'm just like hey hey microsoft what have you got for me um well what happened is it ended up the the darn thing ended up uh just uh duplicating the files that i already have on my on my little one terabyte SSD that I have in this thing. And the whole thing is mostly filled up with duplicates. And so now what I'm going to do, this is fun. I order, I finally ordered, I finally ordered a raid.

Finally did this so many years later, I know. And I'm going to basically take all the data that's on here, dump it on there, and then I'm going to start from scratch. And I was kind of thinking that this is the best way to actually enter into 2026. Because, you know, releasing yourself of the old demons that live in your laptop or computer. Sometimes literally. Those jobs that didn't pan out, those creative projects that didn't pan out, just let them go, baby, and start over. And so that's...

That's where I'm going in the next couple of weeks. So wish me luck. I am wishing you all the luck, all the cleansing. It'll be great. I used to do this relatively regularly. Kind of like what Stephen was talking about in terms of that. you know, there's probably something on here that I put on here that I don't really need to have on here. They might be hurting something somewhere. And it's always in the back of my brain sort of scraping at me going, you know.

there could be a virus on here, something bad that's doing something bad. And so I would regularly... refresh, restore, whatever. Part of it would be that, you know, then any time there'd be something that went wrong on the machine, I'd be going, it's probably because I haven't restored this in a while. And then... My mindset changed where I was like...

man, it's a lot of work to do a restore. Think about all the things you have to do to get it ready and to make sure that you have everything and that you're not going to go, oh. crud, I forgot this one thing that I absolutely needed to move off of the machine before I did this erase. And so that sort of... fear, anxiety has kept me from doing a restore in a long while. But I am also, Stephen, similarly minded in that my MacBook Air, that gets...

restored with some regularity because it's the place where I will now choose to sort of play around. Whereas the Mac Studio is the place that sort of... You know, don't don't do too much on here. It's got to be that system that's there for you when everything else is failing. So all interesting answers all around. Let us go to our next and final topic, which comes from Stephen.

My question for everyone is Gemini and the voice assistant on iPhone. What do we hope it actually does? We actually got the official announcement that Apple is going to be plugging in Gemini behind the scenes for the Apple intelligence features. And, you know, there's lots of rumored features of what it might do, the things they announced at DubDub two years ago. But what do you all hope that it does on your devices? Work.

Next answer. Snarky. It's 2026. I'll be snarky about this because series like 15 years old. Look. The biggest problem with... I mean, God, there's a laundry list of problems with Siri. But here's the biggest thing I am hoping for, which is better understanding. That's it. I don't like to have to compose my thought in advance. I am talking to a robot like I am talking to a dog, and I have to say things in a very specific order so that...

that understands what I'm asking it to do. And if I don't phrase it exactly the way that it wants me to phrase it, it's just going to not do it, or it's going to get confused, or it's going to do the wrong thing. All of those things are basically unacceptable. So Siri has struggled with this.

A lot. I know my wife and I use our little HomePod meeting in the kitchen all the time for playing the local radio station or music or turning on and off lights or adding stuff to our shopping list or setting timers. Those are all great features. They should work 100% of the time.

But every time it adds something random to the list or it says, I don't know what you're talking about, or it says, I can't find that in your home, I get annoyed. And the more I get annoyed, the angrier I get. And I shouldn't be getting angry with a robot. It's just running programs, but it's bad at it.

I think it's great if you want to expand the functionality of all the other things that it might be able to do. But job one is making sure that the stuff it does, it does correctly because I'm never going to rely on it if I always have to double check all of its work. Yeah, I'm not 100% convinced, but I do feel like the technology is out there to make this better. And certainly all these LLMs have showed us that it is possible to have natural language interactions where people...

understand you, even if they don't always do the right thing afterwards, but at least they understand what you're saying. So that's step one, I feel like. Flo? Well, you guys know me. I've just been on Android this whole time. Tell us what to expect then. Tell us what we can hope for. That's exactly what I was going to go for because you're talking about the natural language processing. And yes, Gemini is good at that. But then you're talking.

about not wanting to get mad at the robot in your house and unfortunately I have not had the opposite experience like I definitely I've been cursing a lot more in front of my kid, which is not okay. It just makes me so mad, especially because I've been dealing with the transition from Google Assistant to Gemini with my whole ecosystem. in the house. So I have the Google stuff, you know, that's that's slowly transitioning over. But it's not just the home stuff. It's my car stuff, too. Right.

And so it hasn't been a smooth transition, which makes me think if Google does not do this right as the back end for the Apple user experience. it's going to really mess it up for itself. Because if they leave a bad taste in y'all's mouths... Like, you already have kind of a bad taste because the whole like Google mass surveillance thing, whatever, advertising, etc. I do worry about that. I worry. I worry. And I hope that, you know, Apple is such a very stringent, like, professor.

who i can imagine will be uh smacking google a lot to make sure that all this stuff just like works well um so you'll be able to talk to siri guys but I hope that you'll be able to get your smart home commands too. Yeah. So I've been very, I've talked about this before. I've been very impressed with, um, with Gemini. And I think sometimes people sleep on Gemini because OpenAI has sort of screamed in everyone's faces. And the stuff that...

Gemini is able to do is quite impressive. And so with that, I think that any improvements that will be made there are going to be good. I don't know if I, I still don't know if I have much faith in Apple's sort of take on AI and what it's capable of doing, excuse me, locally on device, but... I hope that given the experiences that I've had with Gemini, there will at least be some improvements made. So yeah, I don't have much else to say really other than I don't have much hope and we shall see.

Yeah, HomePod's getting better would be wonderful. I'm hopeful for just the features they showed off two years ago. Namely, if I want to ask the assistant, when is so-and-so landing at the airport or whatever, that it finds that kind of stuff. but also shortcuts, which is a huge deal for me. I'm very curious how it's going to integrate with that because that's the one place I actually use Apple intelligence all the time. And some of the rumors say that like, well, private cloud compute.

It'll basically still be that, but the back end will now be Gemini, which maybe that's great. I wonder if we'll get an extension like ChatGPT built into iOS or built into shortcuts at least, where you can choose like private cloud compute, local model. ChatGPT extension and or Gemini. That would be nice. But I really just wanted to be able to do things that they showed off. Like if I'm looking at an email to be able to ask the assistant, make this a reminder and remind me tomorrow at 10 a.m.

You know, you should just be able to do that. Like I've created hundreds of shortcuts just to do the things that Apple intelligence should be able to do. And I'm hoping that it can start taking over some of those tasks just built in. And, you know, visual intelligence is actually.

pretty good if people have not used that recently so if you see a date on screen just invoke visual intelligence it recognizes it one tap and it's in your calendar it's like okay well i can do that if i take a screenshot it would be great if you can do it

just anywhere in the OS by asking the voice assistant, make this a reminder, make this a calendar event, find me that message where so-and-so talked about X. Hopefully that kind of stuff is what comes. And so I'm hopeful to see the stuff they showed off two years ago.

Good hope. Yeah, that stuff that's two years late. Let's do that. All right, that's four topics down. We got just enough time for a bonus topic. And my question for you is this, what is your current or if you prefer all time go to hype song flow? The entire Discovery album by Daft Punk, because you just start it with One More Time, and you just go into the whole thing, and it's a really great way to put your makeup on.

Nice. Love that. Mine is take on me. Aha. Forever and always. Mine is Hans Zimmer playlist. I'll start with corn chase. Maybe time, whatever's on that playlist. I'll just listen to that. For the last year for me, it's been ELO's Don't Bring Me Down, which is just, it's got the beat, man. Once it gets going, you got to jive.

All right. Thank you all for your answers to that question. Hey, if you out there would like to get ad-free episodes with an extra Unwound episode every week, you can become a member of Clockwise. Just go to relay.fm slash clockwise.

And sign up for just $7 per month or $70 per year, and you will help support us here at the show. We really appreciate it. And with that, we have reached the end of this week's episode. All that remains is for us to thank our fantastic guests. Florence Ion, thank you so much for being here this week.

Thank you guys for always having me. You're the best. And Stephen Robles, thank you so much for being here. Always great. Thank you. And 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.