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Clockwise
659: Use Your Meaty Stuff
00:29:59
WWDC expectations, how we squeeze more life out of older gadgets, our search engine habits, and the next craft projects tech will help us with.
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A
You.
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B
It's Time for episode 659 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, June 3, 2026. Clockwise 4 people, 4 tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where WWC stands for We Will Divine Clocks. My name is Dan Moran and I'm joined across the Internet by my good friend, my pal, the one, the only, Micah Sergeant. How you doing today, Micah?
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A
I am doing well.
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B
Okay. Oh, there's.
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A
I can see the clock in front of me.
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B
Okay, I see where we're going. Okay, hold on, let me get into the. Oh, what does the clock say, oh powerful and wise one?
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A
The clock says. Well, it doesn't say anything because it's a clock.
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B
I heard. Oh, man, I saved this for a future or for a future intro. But my. The other day my son told me a joke and the joke was, what is a clock's favorite time?
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A
What is a clock's favorite time?
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B
6:32, hands down. Think about it. All right, all right, that's enough of that. Let's get on to the show. The clock is really saying it's time to start the show. This is, of course, the one where we have two fantastic guests discuss four tech topics this week. To my left, it's senior reporter at Engadget, Karissa Bell. Welcome back, Carissa.
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C
Hello. Hello. Happy to be here.
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A
And to my left, still thinking honestly about two hands down. But to my left, nebulous media guy, it's Chris Finn.
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D
Welcome back. It's the only way I can think of describing my career just now. It's impossible to describe. Hello, folks.
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B
I hear that. All right, we got four topics, just 30 minutes. Let's get going. WWC, as I mentioned in my intro, is next week Apple's annual developer conference. I'm curious to know if there are any rumored announcements that you're actually excited for, slash interested in, and whether or not you think there will be any surprises. Give us your. Give us your $0.02 on this one, Chris.
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C
Yeah, so I'm actually going to be at WWDC this year, so I am particularly excited to be back after a few years, I think. So the one thing that I would really want to have seen that I am excited for, but it looks like it's not going to be happening for a while, is the rumored Apple smart glasses. I write a lot about smart glasses, so obviously that's something that's very top of mind for me. But since we're going to get that, I think I'm really going to be looking out for all the siri stuff that's been kind of a big stumble for them. Obviously, we're going to hear a lot about AI, so just, you know, hearing kind of the updated plans for Siri after sort of the debacle that happened previously, that's going to be the thing that I'm most looking out for, and hopefully we'll be surprised in a good way.
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A
A lot of the AI announcements at this point do feel rather repetitive. And so in that way, I think that I am excited to see if Apple can say or do anything that actually feels exciting that has not already been sort of covered and figured out. Of course, you know, we're excited in the additional behavior, additional features that we'll have. But more importantly, I'm going, okay, are you just going to show me the thing that everybody else has already done and now you're just sort of. This is. Yeah, we're checking the boxes here. So I, I hope, I hope to be excited, and I am excited about the potential for being excited is my answer. Chris, what is yours?
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D
Yeah, I kind of a similar take to you, Micah. I think the challenge with AI stuff is twofold. One, oh, my God, AI. I can't hear any more about AI. The other one is it feels like I'm stuck in Groundhog Day where Apple is for the 74th time running. Right, guys, guys, guys, guys. Siri, this time is going to be great. We've fixed it. It's going to be intelligent, responsive, context aware. This is the time we're fixing Siri, folks, and I'm really, really bored of it. So it might happen, some good stuff might come out of it, but I just, I'm not excited about AI in general, and I use Siri rarely. And you could argue maybe that's because it's not good, but AI will fix it, then you'll use it and it'll be okay. And maybe that's true, but I just, I'm just a bit bored. The thing that I'm kind of hopeful for is a kind of surprise, in the same way as a lot of us think that the iPhone air was a sort of technical exercise in advance of a foldable iPhone, like working out how to do things as slim as possible so that when you've got two of them or more of them together, then it's not a ridiculous brick of a Nokia phone. But so in the same ways we saw those kind of advancements happening in hardware and we received an iPhone air out of that. Maybe we'll see some, because dub dub is of course, a Developer conference. Maybe we'll see some stuff about how you manage multiple screens and windowing and splitting stuff. But again, that feels like Apple once again trying to fix solve the problem that they created for themselves, the iPad by switching around between center stage and wind environments and mirroring and externals. And I don't know quite what they'll do, but maybe if the rumored iPhone fold is on its way, maybe we'll see some software features trickling down to the rest of us.
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B
These are all good answers. I think there's a wide variety of stuff. I mean obviously I think for me on the AI front, which is clearly the thing that everybody's talking about, I'm really looking forward to seeing if Apple can show us some practical explanations and applications as opposed to, I think what tend to be a little bit more either technical or pie in the sky solutions from, you know, other companies purveying AI. I mean there are so many companies that want AI to be a thing and sometimes the examples they give of what people use it for will be truly inane. Apple's.
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D
Well also, can I just interrupt there for a sec because MKBHD did a piece about AI recently and sort of talking about the fact that hey, there's this thing that will book your holidays for you and he saw link do we really want like I'd like to go to the Seychelles place booked and just nothing in between, like what flights am I on? Like did we check prices? What's the workout to get to here? So even the sort of practical examples people give are often like, I don't, I'm not comfortable seating that level of control at all.
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B
Right. I think that is a big question. And so the, Is there a way that there is a, you know, Apple has showed off in the past with these features that it was not able to ship things that are a little bit more practical like hey, what time does my mom's flight arrive? And just understanding of things non structured data, there is a lot of power in that. Even more so than like do these things for me because I agree with you that I don't think a lot of people necessarily want to give up all of that control. Even people like look how great it is if you can do this. And it's like, but does anybody actually do that? And so Apple, you know, obviously has a history of building consumer products and to that end it has to sort of be responsive to what people actually want to do. And you know, it's not always successful in that way. But I think it tends to have a pretty good hit rate. So can it break this streak of having people tell us why we should be excited by AI and instead actually make people excited about AI? I think that's both what I'm looking forward to and will be kind of a surprise if they manage to pull it off. But I too will be there. So, Chris, I'll find you, give you a high five. All right, that's my topic. Carissa, what's yours?
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C
So it seems like this never ending RAM crisis we're in is making just about every gadget more expensive. We're seeing price increases every week. We recently saw Steam decks go up quite a lot. So it got me thinking, what's your best tip for squeezing more life from an older device so you don't have to spend more to get something new?
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A
I love this question. And when I first read this, I kind of saw it as more of almost a maintenance thing, a way to make sure that if things like this happen, you've got older devices that you can rely on. And so I think that my advice though, does apply. Apply also to advice or to devices that you might be using now that you're trying to keep going longer. And that is, first and foremost, clean them. And I especially mean for things that have moving parts, which tends to be kind of where we are in the. We're talking about sort of the crisis at the moment. It's, it's, you know, bigger hardware and there are, you know, a number of times where I've had a friend or a family member and they've got a problem with their console or a problem with their laptop and pop off the back and it's just got all this dust and gunk and things. And so then the fa, it's everything. And heat is obviously such an issue for battery life. And so that's another reason to keep them clean. The second thing is if you've got stuff that you're wanting to hold on to for later, perhaps, or keep around knowing that you might want to use it, Remember that battery life is not just important in the short term, but also in the long term. When you're storing them, store them at 50% charge and then pull them out every three to six months to charge them back to that 50% whenever you store them. I more went into doomsday prepping with your question, but there are some tips for future options. Chris, what are yours?
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D
I mean, the traditional advice here is install Linux. And I think that's genuinely a good bit of advice and I know it can be A bit intimidating and scary if you've got a real bit of hardware, but there's a whole mess of really user friendly distros out there that are designed to work well with stable platforms and I think you'll have a really good so in various. I haven't done that myself for ages because I don't have time and I don't have the inclination to do it. But my being, my main tip really is a mindset shift one rather than a practical one which is maybe just downgrade what you think you can use that old kit for. So I recently put a M4 Pro Mac mini as my main machine now insanely capable machine. I still have that old Intel MacBook Pro that I use as my old on the go computer, but it's mostly a sort of writing and emails machine and that can be true of a whole bunch of stuff as well. You don't always have to a buy new stuff as Carissa is suggesting is the challenge here. But also you can sort of mindset shift the stuff you've got. I actually do a decent amount of typing on an ancient Bluetooth folding keyboard designed for like Pocket Windows CE or whatever the hell it was called that folds really nicely. Connects to my iPhone and I can type stuff really well on that. And I think shifting your expectations of tech, like use your meaty stuff for stuff that needs that power, but for stuff that doesn't need that power, you're actually going to get tons and tons. Just because something's rubbish at rendering 4K video doesn't mean to say it's rubbish at everything. So shift your mind a little bit and you'll get some good life out of your devices.
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B
Yeah, I mean I think mine is pretty similar to your Chris. Like I think a lot of it is about how you approach these things. I know people who, I'm always surprised when I find people using, you know, devices that are way older than devices I would use. And I, I know that's in part because I succumb to the new shiny temptation. Right. You know, oh, this thing's out and it's newer and it's different and boy, my old computer's getting all gunked up and like, you know, I, I think that's the way that these, the system wants you to feel. And instead, you know, I think the people who are tend to be a little more unplugged, tend to make their devices last longer and see things with a longer lifespan. I was just talking to a friend of mine who's like, yeah, I Guess it's, guess it's finally time to update this nine year old laptop. I've got. I was like, my God, you're going to be blown away with how good a laptop is after nine years. Whereas you know, for you upgrade every three or four years, like I've gotten some nice bumps out of those. But like it is very different when you go on those long spans between updates. So I think that's one thing. I think micro Micah's battery tips are good. Obviously, you know you can get batteries and a lot of devices replaced if you're willing to pay a little bit more. I've been debating this guy. I have an older Apple Watch Series 7, which I like quite a bit and it's mostly fine, but it does suffer from low battery life. It's like, well, would it just be easier to get this battery replaced than to buy a whole new watch? Do I really need a whole new watch? What is that actually going to get me? So I think there is kind of a combination there of both trying to like make sure that your old devices are in as good condition as they can be and also to remember that you don't have to buy something new if you are happy with what you have right now. And in many cases what we have is frankly overkill for many of the things that a lot of us do all day. So I guess that's my sort of tip. Why don't you wrap us up here?
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C
Yeah, I love these answers. So this was inspired by my own old laptop, which is one of Those rose gold 2017, I think MacBooks, the one with the butterfly keyboard. I'm very attached to it. It's. I pulled it out the other day. It was just, you know, it's extremely slow. The WI fi was kind of dropping in and out and I'm like, is it time for a new laptop? Really? You know, I don't use it this much. It's mostly, you know, like Chris said, I kind of, it's kind of an email machine. I was like, let's see if we can rehab this. I, you know, I did all the normal stuff, you know, software updates and, and kind of like basic maintenance stuff. And it kind of helped. And then I actually got the idea to maybe use AI for this. So I installed codecs which can't actually really run that well natively on a MacBook that old. But once you install it, you can run it in Terminal. So I opened up terminal and I started asking Codex to help me find ways that I could optimize the performance of the Mac if it could help me troubleshoot the WI fi issue. And it actually was able to give me a bunch of suggestions. Figured out the wifi issue, which took like a few steps. Had to do some stuff with my home router, but now it's running better than it has in years. And it just kind of made me realize that, you know, if you're willing to put in a little bit of work and you know, to the point that Dan was just making, you know, you really can make these older devices last so much longer. You know, if you really kind of change your mindset around how long they're supposed to be for and, you know, whether you actually really need something new or if you can make the thing you already have work for what you need.
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B
All right, that is two topics down, two topics left to go. Which of course means it is halftime here at clockwise. And this week's episode is brought to you by our friends at Vitally, the AI powered workspace for customer success managers. Vitally's purpose built AI is for scaled customer success. It's there to help you better understand customers, to reduce, churn, unlock growth and always stay a step ahead. Basically all the things that make you great at your job. Vitally delivers the clarity, automation and AI driven insights your team needs so you can move faster, stay aligned and drive customer outcomes at scale. Vitally AI surfaces insights from every customer interaction to unlock another level of CS productivity, visibility and collaboration. That's why Vitally is trusted by more than 600 leading B2B SaaS customer success teams. And how's this for a great offer? Vitally is offering a free pair of AirPods Pro for every clockwise listener who takes a qualified demo call. So if you're a customer success decision maker, schedule your call by visiting Vitaly IO clockwise. That's vitally IO clockwise for a free pair of AirPods Pro when you take a qualified demo. Our thanks to Vitally for their support of this show and relay. All right, halftime is over. Micah, back to you.
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A
Yes, I would just like to know, what search engine do you use? Have you perhaps made a switch recently? And then I would like to hear your thoughts on typing in a search and getting an AI overview to kick things off. Chris, we'll start with you.
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D
So my main search engine these days is DuckDuckGo, which I made that switch two, three years ago, I think, and that was in part, you know, refocus on my privacy and on tech that is not as, I think compromised as Google's stack is just now, so I had been using Google, as most of the world does, switch to DuckDuckGo. It's broadly fine. The worst thing I think I found is that it's rubbish for memes. If I'm trying to find a meme, duckduckgoes really bad at finding them. So I will type in google.co.uk, like a caveman and then put in my search string there. But it's broadly, it makes no difference. So switching your default engine, which you can do on like, you know, anything, is easy. I will sometimes use Google for not just memes, but sometimes it is a little better for some stuff. But I think defaulting myself to something that's not Google, I think is a good shot. AI summaries, AI overviews can be super useful. They can be a really good glanceable way of getting some information, especially for something that's quite low stakes. But I have two concerns. One is accuracy, obviously, and then the other one is, I mean, that information was scraped from somewhere. So all of a sudden somebody who wrote a thing that this question is being answered with is not getting a page impression and therefore ad revenue based on that. And I don't like that centralization of power. Dan, are you less do mongery than
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B
I am or more? I'm probably a little more set in my ways. I'm still using Google as frustrated as I get with it from time to time, not only for the AI overuse, but generally just, I think, less relevance in the results. Things like it's really impossible to find anything old on the Internet, which is frustrating when you're trying to do some research or dig up an old story or something. I've been tempted by some others. I've used DuckDuckGo in the past. Um, I've sort of flirted with making it my default. I think I got frustrated at the time, and this was many years ago because I felt the results were not as good as Google's. But I'm kind of willing to give it another shot. I know a lot of people have talked about Kagi, which I used a trial of, and thought it was fine, but wasn't ready to pony up the, you know, 10 bucks a month or whatever to, to get all the searching. I just, I, it's. It wasn't so much better for me in terms of what I was doing to make me feel like it was worth paying for. But perhaps that will change if Google continues to go on the downhill slide that it's been on. Karissa, what about you?
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C
I use Yahoo Search. No, I'm just kidding. I'm definitely still, you know, using Google 99.9% of the time. Say more. Just force of habit and ecosystem lock in and, and all those things. Although I definitely more and more see the appeal of something like DuckDuckGo AI overviews. It's one of those things where I would be lying if I said I don't ever do a search, see the AI overview and then go cool and then move on with whatever it is I was doing. But I do, similar to what Chris was saying, as somebody who is in an industry that completely relies on people clicking on links and web traffic, there's a lot about AI overviews that really is troubling to say the least. And then I've also found that for anything that's not sort of a simple, straightforward search, I find that there's often either, if not glaringly wrong, there's often nuances that are actually just not right. For example, you often do an AI overview and then if you look at where it's sourcing, it's sourcing Reddit threads, for example, and I'm somebody, I'll go in and I'll tap into those Reddit threads and sort of look at the underlying conversation that this AI overview is citing. And I often find that it's not quite characterizing it correctly so that maybe it's giving you an answer, but then when you actually kind of dig into its sourcing, it's not really actually always giving you a completely accurate or fully contextualized result. So I do worry too that it's sort of degrading kind of the information ecosystem, I guess, for lack of a better word, because it's so easy to just kind of see that, that thing right up top, read those two sentences and kind of move on and not realize always when it is making a mistake or not giving you the full picture. So I think there is a lot that is worrying about AI overviews. AI search is kind of move away from just sort of like traditional search
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A
as we think about it, very well put there at the end. When it comes to these AI overviews, I obviously have concerns about. I am, I've been very happy to hear just how many people are annoyed by them and are, you know, DuckDuckGo is basically every chance they get letting everybody know about how many people are switching over to it. And I'm happy about that because my biggest concern when AI overviews started to really pop up was the idea that you'd type in something that is, you know, verifiable. And unfortunately, the result that is returned is inaccurate. And then that just gets carried through and carried through and carried through. So the fact that people are kind of not enjoying these AI overviews and looking for other opportunities is great. I will say that when I do a Google. Well, there you go. When I do a search, I do typically do a Google search. I will scroll past or use the non AI mode. But I find myself rarely doing searches like that online these days. I typically am going to specific websites for specific things. And so I don't do a lot of searching, but when I do, yeah, just a little scroll past. All right, thank you all for your answers on that. Let's get to our next topic, which comes from Chris.
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D
We love tech. Usually most of us listening to this podcast or on this podcast right now, but tech should be in service of human creativity. And I wonder, and I suspect I'll get a good answer from Micah on this, but I'm not sure about the rest of you. Let's see, what is the last or next cool, like, craft project you've got coming up that your computer is going to help you with?
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B
Dan, bold of you to assume that I have any crafting expertise at all. I am not a particularly crafty person. I will say I have definitely used some, like, I've done some, like, home improvement stuff using some technological tools. I mean, some of it just like installing smart, like, light switches and stuff like that. I would say the sort of craftiest, like, art stuff I do. I mean, that's writing. I mean, I just use computer. I just type on things. Guys, I'm not. I'm not exciting here. I don't do exciting craft projects. I wish I had a better answer for this, but I've really never been a terribly like, like, good person for. For coming up or building things. I've definitely helped my kid with some stuff, but, like, I think it's largely at this point still like, building stuff with Duplos rather than building anything that's super creative. But I. I'm hoping that maybe the next generation will change that and maybe that will. I will get some of that craftiness in, like, a reverse osmosis fashion. That's the best I can hope for, unfortunately. Carissa, what about you?
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C
Yeah, so what came to mind was my dad recently had a milestone birthday and we decided to use one of those online services where you can make, like, a custom vinyl record for somebody.
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A
Cool.
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C
And so we did that. And then part of the fun thing about it is you get to design the actual album cover that goes with it. So we kind of collaborated on it. I used Photoshop to make a photo collage for the backside and then for the front of the album we used a photo of him that we had. And then one of my relatives used ChatGPT to kind of make it into sort of a photo illustration, kind of type image of him. And then, you know, use that to like add some text and, and kind of make this, this custom cover and ended up, you know, looking really cool. And like, I think we were all kind of surprised by how, how good it came out and it was. I don't know if that's really crafting because ultimately it was, you know, this third party company that was actually kind of putting the thing together. But it was a really fun project and definitely something that we all kind of used a little bit of tech for along the way.
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A
What did the pirate say on his 80th birthday? I matey, so what I am doing, I'm going to be going to the Ren Faire soon. And something that I didn't, we never did when I was in high school and went to the Ren Faire but I learned at the Portland or at the Oregon Ren Faire is that people will bring little trinkets and they will give you little trinkets and then if you have trinkets, you can give trinkets to them. So I am going to be going as a pirate and I'm going to have tiny little messages in a bottle, but inside, because I love dad jokes, AKA puns, I have a bunch of different pirate jokes. And in order to do this, I have, I got this parchment paper and I'm going to be using my Cricut crafting machine which is basically just it's computerized arm that moves, or yeah, arm, I guess that moves around and can cut but also can write. And so I'm going to have it write out these things on this parchment that I have and then I'll be able to roll those up and put them into the little glass bottles and hand those out and watch people roll their eyes and groan whenever they read the hilarious pirate jokes. And I'm very excited about it and I'm so glad you asked this question.
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D
You did not disappoint, Mike. Just incredible, incredible scenes for me. You might have heard of sun paper, which is photosensitive paper you can put out in the sun and usually people lay flowers on them and that will expose the flowers through the sun. It's a process called cyanotype But I'm going to be using my computer and my laser printer to print those negatives on transparencies. And a friend and I have been talking about it for ages. We really want to do it. We've got everything. Now we just need to pick the images and do some tests which we'll be doing tomorrow. And ultimately what we're going to do is make hoodies for each other that have got images printed on them. You can just slosh the photo sensitive chemicals on fabric as well, expose those through the transparency so we can transfer that negative image in the positive. So it'll be walking art. Should be really fun.
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B
All right, well, that is four topics down. Just enough time for a bonus topic. Before then, I'll remind you to go over to Clockwise social for all of your clockwise swag needs. Hats, T shirts, mugs, beanies, everything. We've got it all. It helps support the show. We really appreciate it. Bonus topic time. What is the farthest distance wise that you've ever been from home? Carissa?
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C
So that would be Argentina and specifically the south of Argentina, a town called Bariloche, which is sort of in the southern area, like in the, I guess more northern part of the Patagonia region. Not all the way down south where the glaciers are and stuff, but definitely pretty far. My husband's originally from Argentina, so we go visit there fairly often and see family and see the rest of the country.
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B
Nice.
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A
I'm convinced that this is the reverse of me asking if people have upgraded their TVs or if they have a newer car with CarPlay, although that's changed a little bit. But that's because I've never been out of the country. So I would say living growing up in Missouri, when we would go to California, I believe that's the problem is Missouri is right in the middle or it's very close to the middle. So that makes it difficult. I don't know if that is technically farther going to California or going to some of the northeastern locations in the U.S. but yeah, somewhere. Somewhere around there, but still within the states. Chris, what about you?
- [28:18]
D
Well, I also live in the middle, you know, literally on the prime meridian. So for me I had to check the distances, but Kyoto just wins about 6,000 miles. But San Francisco is a little over 5,000 miles the other direction. So it's between those two. But Kyoto gets the prize.
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B
Nice. Yeah, I think my wife lived in India for a little while and so I spent a lot of time over there. But we also took a vacation at the end of her time there to the Maldives, which I am told is 8,700 and about 45 miles from where I live right now. It's just above the equator.
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D
And you set this question down, right? Just to be.
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B
Just to check there's no competition other than I win, but beyond that, everything's fine anyways. Yeah, I'm not sure I. I'm not. I'm not sure how much farther I could go without looping back on the other side there. So that's not bad. But thank you all for your answer to that. And let me remind you that if you 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 clockwise and sign up for just $7 per month or $70 a year and you'll help support the show. And with that, we have reached the end of this week's episode. All that remains is for us to thank our fantastic guest, Carissa Bell. Thank you so much for joining us.
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C
Thank you.
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A
And of course, Chris Finn, thank you so much for being here.
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D
Thank you. Go make something.
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B
And Michael, we'll be back next week. But until then, we remind everyone out there listening, watch what you say and
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A
keep watching the clock.
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B
Bye, everybody.