Solid State Podcast: Recent Episodes
John Joyce
A weekly show from three hosts deep ”in the trenches of tech”, discussing the latest news, events, and cultural moments around the technology industry and the products, people, and services touching our daily lives.
The age-old saying “The more things change the more they stay the same” couldn’t be… more accurate for this week’s show.
It’s no secret that we do this show because we love it… we’re not here to be on billboards, top any charts, or quote-unquote “move the needle”… We do the thing out of a genuine passion for the thing we’re doing.
126 times later… well, it had to happen… we… ended up in the same room.
Talking over each other? Turns out that’s not because of the call lag. Running way over on time? That definitely didn’t get any better. Having the opportunity to do something so “routine” shoulder-to-shoulder with two of the best in the biz? As they say… priceless.
The only sadness to be found in the room was the realization after the red light turned off was that this really was a “once in a blue moon” opportunity… next go around we’ll be back in front of our cameras, poorly lit by monitors and effects lights, wondering why we can’t pick a better time of day to do this.
Or… who knows… maybe we’ve got even more in store just around the corner. Guess you’ll have to wait and see…
This show has a whole lot of… “whys” behind it… Education(ish) for sure, its just fun is a definite top three, but right atop the mountain for me, at least, is and continues to be our shared, mutual, and genuine love of these silly hunks of plastic, bundles of wires, and ever-charging batteries we simply call “gadgets”.
And there’s no better time of year to be a tried-and-true Gadget Head than Gadget Season, of course! After an entire year-to-date of announcements, developer conferences, thinly veiled teases, and giant quote-unquote “leaks”… this is the time when the devices get packed, the tracking numbers are issued, and the highly rendered version in the advertisement of whatever we spent our money on runs face-first into this harsh thing called reality.
Do we watch said tracking from shipment-to-delivery with the excitement of a child staring at the chimney on Christmas Eve? More than I’d like to admit. Will any of this year’s lineup of next-big-things change any our lives? Most certainly not. Are any of them even any good? Guess that’s why you’re here, now isn’t it?
With no further ado, we’re going to chat through some glasses that are here, some slightly more interesting glasses that… aren’t… as well as newly arrived earbuds, smartphones, and even watches from both this century and last… I promise, that one will make more sense in the wrap.
Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, we even have a tease of our own at the end of the show… what can I say, we couldn’t help ourselves? Guess you’ll have to listen and find out… and hey, no skipping!
Spoilers…
Listen… some weeks I more-or-less bore you with pieces of my own tech history that, honestly, you only just barely signed up for…
Other weeks though, well let’s face it there’s just no room for preamble!
Generally speaking, mid-ish September is often one of those weeks because, there’s no other way to say it, it’s iPhone announcement week! In a now-tradition going back to October 2011 and the fall launch of the iPhone 4S (and yes, “S” was for Siri, come at me I’ll die on that hill), the long days of summer begin slipping into recent memory and a fall of holiday shopping, (hopefully) cooling temperatures, and shiny new iPhones have been cornerstones over since.
Is this the end of Apple’s “year”? Almost certainly not. But even with iPads, processors, and other accessories still to come in the weeks and months ahead, it’s still impossible to ignore that this remains “The Big One”…
And, to be fair, it’s (as usual) not just phones on tap here… we’ve got AirPods and an assortment of watches to get through as well…
In the end, the final question is really the only one that matters… are any of these gadgets your next one? Let’s find out…
So it’s not going to exactly be a big secret, you’ll undoubtedly hear it in today’s recording (sorry about that…) but I… have a cold. It’s nothing so terrible that I’m “bed ridden”, but at the same time I absolutely feel like a walking zombie who’s taking 3-4x longer to perform even the most basic task. At thirty seven years old, this is mildly inconvenient at best and day-altering at worst. Twenty five or thirty years ago though… school-aged John would have had one agenda… a day off in pajamas filled with Mario, Pokemon, and Mega Man on nothing other than my trusty Gameboy…
So it’s no wonder, these literal decades later, that on stuffy-headed days like today I have a nearly innate yearning to pickup my Gameboy’s spiritual successor the Switch an proceed “recovering” on the couch to the subtle tones of Zelda’s background music…
In that moment, though, it hits me… yes the Switch is “portable”, I guess you can even call it “hand held” (with two hands, looking at you, dbrand)... but the equation has changed SO much since the still very pocket-able Gameboy days (and the DS, 3DS, even 3DS XL that followed).
So the question is, have we lost something in translation? Was the true best, final form of the portable gaming device a foot-wide slab that mostly fits in a backpack? Or are we missing out on the best 10-15 minutes of gaming we could find here and there when still truly amazing titles were along for the ride in our pocket.
Battery just finished charging, so lets find out…
I’ve talked, quite recently actually, about my “island of misfit toys”… my shelves upon shelves of yesterday’s tech, lost to time maybe but not to memory. While this week’s entries are very unlikely to earn a spot on said shelf, it doesn’t stop me considering the generations of devices to come first every time a new contender enters the market.
Earlier this week I was doing exactly that exercise, taking in a time when phones had home buttons, scroll balls… heck, even a headphone jack… and what occurred to me the further I went “back in time” was how much more diverse and, well, obvious the design choices were. One manufacturer might try a “chin” at the bottom of their phone, thinking the would be the thing to make them stand out, while at basically the same time others would try not-so-subtle curves to their glass.
These choices, some paradigm shifting and some… not… did at the very least lead to generation after generation of devices that you could actually tell apart from across a crowded room. Today, for the most part though, you nearly have to hold the phone just right in the light to make out the logo on the back or risk uttering the wrong brand in conversation…
The one place this “unified theory of phone design” doesn’t seem to have set in, yet at least, is over in foldables. Yes, they obviously have certain qualities in common like, you know, a hinge… but past that we see companies trying different paths still in aspect ratio, material design, even dare-I-say form factor…
So, when given the chance to look at the paths chosen by Samsung and Google in nearly-consecutive weeks, it’s honestly so much more entertaining to take in the technical advances, sure, but really spend our time interrogating the choices then went into making these things. Why go wider instead of taller? Should it open to be more square, or rectangle? Need we continue to fear dust or 50 grams of added weight in our pockets more?
The answer to all the above came from a meeting, a design group, a decision… and now we have these devices in our lives to ask the only obvious question in reply… who made the right call?
Origin stories are a funny thing… they’re one part history lesson, two parts Science Fiction often times, and just a dash of self-indulgent FanFic about ourselves for added flavor…
So when we took a proper look at our own origin stories, how we got to this very place in our careers as technology professionals and card-carrying-nerds… we pushed past all the gadgets, all the experimental builds-gone-wrong, and all the countless nights on the couch, controller in hand, with just one more boss to beat… and realized before all those pixels, frames, and gigahertz was a dark room, a table, and friends with character sheets in one hand and dice in the other…
Table top Roleplaying Games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and the myriad of others like them have gone through something of a cultural resurgence in the last decade for sure. From Stranger Things to Baldur’s Gate to… well… a literal movie called “Dungeon’s & Dragons” starring none other than a Potato Dragon… But even before they found their way into the hearts and minds of a seemingly whole new generation of fans, characters, and future DMs… there was still a quiet army of devoted fans rolling out a map, putting on background music, and hosting their regular game night.
And that’s the part we couldn’t ignore any longer… sure there is literally no tech to be found here… except that every single ounce of our love of all-things-technology, gadgets, and “the future” has direct connective tissue to the creativity, imagination, and… fun that starts sitting around that table.
So screens off, ringers to silent, and grab your dice (you know you’ve got ‘em)… let’s play.
The saying “time flies” has always troubled me… time feels like one of those constants we should be able to rely on yet, as it indeed goes by, I will at least agree our perception of it, at minimum… evolves.
Take “the long days of summer” for instance… I can remember as a school-aged kid thinking summers would never end, I’d get to play with my friends from sun-up-to-sun-down forever, and fifth grade was a distant future that, as far as I was concerned, would never arrive.
Now today, many, many… many… summers later… another one is almost over?
Yep, as impossible as it is to believe, “Back to school” is in the air as parents begin gathering supplies, teachers begin dressing up rooms, and retailers across the land are… well… putting up “Sale” signs.
Whether you’re needing to pick up a bluetooth mouse for your Middle Schooler’s Chromebook because it turns out Sunny D and trackpads don’t mix, or you’re on your twelfth laptop review (that all somehow say the same yet polar opposite things) scouring the internet for the gear of the Class of 2029 (yikes) this is not-so-sneakily one of the prime times of year to upgrade and expand your tech while stretching every dollar nearly to its limit.
Is every laptop the cheapest it will ever be? Nope.
Is this deal, that conveniently “ends” in 59 minutes, ever going to come around again? Without a doubt.
Does the MacBook Air still reign supreme as the “laptop for everyone”, students, professionals, and grandparents alike?
Guess you’ll just have to listen and find out…
On a shelf in my office is a line of phones… No they’re not spares, or “extras”, heck the vast majority of them probably don’t even turn on any more. Instead they represent signpost moments in my own technology journey. Far in the back is the same candy-bar shaped Nokia “brick” that pretty much every phone-using person had at one point in the early 2000’s… it was my first cell phone. A little further over is a lightly cracked but still intact Google Nexus One… not the first Android phone, but it was my first Android phone… You get it, and trust me the list goes on… these devices aren’t valuable or even particularly special… but each one anchors to a point in time of my journey to this very moment in the tech world, and hopefully the collection will keep growing.
So what then, does that have to do with Samsung’s Summer 2025 “Unpacked” foldable event? See, one thing I find interesting about my own shelves of IT History is that no where on them… from a TRS-80 to the original Chromebook Pixel… is a true foldable (No, I don’t count you, Surface Duo. ).
I’ve owned quite a few, going back years at this point. We’ve talked about most of them on this very show! So why then, has each one disappeared into obscurity as the next is announced unlike the dozens of personal artifacts on those shelves?
To be quite honest… a lot of it has to do with these things are freakin expensive, trade-ins have been a big part of getting “the next one”… and that… hasn’t changed this time around.
So this week we’ve got phones, watches, software, the full gamut to talk about… and we will. But somehow, as I anticipate receiving this years entries and seeing where they fit in my own day-to-day technology life… I can’t help but wonder… will any of them end up on the shelf?
Guess we’ll have to wait and see…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we talk about… Nothing…
No, really… Nothing actually has new headphones, and we talk about them!
In case you can’t tell, a slough of major events from I/O to WWDC are behind us and while we wait for Samsung and others to fill our lives with more gadgets in the coming weeks, we chose to take a beat and meander (as we’re want to do) through everything from the iOS 26 Beta to Switch cases and car sized, galaxy filming cameras…
So, in the market for a new pair of smart glasses? This week (shocker to no one), we’ve got you covered. Ever laid awake at night wishing your digital photos had the look-and-feel of classic, 1980’s Fuji film cameras (because who hasn’t…)? Yep, that’s on tap too.
And if all that wasn’t enough, I still find time to take a (somewhat) abridged tirade through Microsoft’s seemingly willful inability to just listen to good advice and treat Xbox like the software platform that it rightfully is rather than a (now) overpriced, nearly long-in-the-tooth black cube in your entertainment center…
Well, considering it’s a show about Nothing, somehow we found an awful lot to say… too much even. But let’s not forget, you chose to be here, so with that let’s dive in and see what this week really has in store…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, well… there’s just no other way to say it… it’s WWDC!
That’s right, it’s summertime in 2025 and that means nothing other than Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference just took place and with it a slough of announcements, Beta releases to play with, and an ever-sharpening picture of where Apple at least thinks it wants to go with its broader product line in the coming months, years, and frankly beyond…
We know full well our episodes are never exactly… umm… short… But this one was a challenge even for us to fit it all into a single run. We’re not saying it was an action packed event… far from it in fact… but what Apple did bring to the table could have far reaching implications for almost every corner of their product and service offerings.
User interface and design, power user workflows, a new naming convention across the board of their OS’s, and… dare we say it… an actual mouse pointer in iPad OS? Yeah, this isn’t exactly “put it up on a billboard” kind of stuff, but in possibly a much more meaningful way it could represent one of the most end-to-end changes in both the look-and-feel as well as the overall usability of Apple’s core products for many of its users.
And, at the end of the day, if you’re really just here to have an iPhone, use it every day, and be annoyed once every Fall when all of your buttons move around for seemingly no reason after a reboot one night… then, well, this Fall is likely to be no different for you…
This year had all the hallmarks… an internet full of “Apple is doomed” predictions, further confirmation of Apple “falling behind” in a race that may or may not even actually be happening, and once again adding Wallpaper to one of its product was an on-stage, announcement worthy moment for team-fruit…
Like I said, it’s WWDC, would we have it any other way?
Technology, in a weird way, is at its best when it makes us feel like a kid again…
It’s hard to ignore the swell of emotion and nostalgia… as gamers, nerds, or whatever you want to call us… when you fire up a classic that takes you right back to sitting precious too-few inches in front of a TV playing countless hours until being told for the twelfth time that it was absolutely time to go to bed…
So it comes as no shock, based on nothing else than how many times we’ve talked about it in the years that we’ve been waiting for this very day, that it was suddenly 1991 again the moment a relatively little, red blue and black box with “Nintendo Switch 2” emblazoned on the side was (honestly unexpectedly) in our very presence…
Were the preorders nothing short of a debacle? I refer you to a previous episode…
Was a single retailer effective in communicating how one was supposed to even try to exchange currency for one of these seemingly-gold-plated marvels? It was so bad it was almost by design…
Did all of that disappear into a puff of digital smoke the moment I hit a two-second-launch perfectly on my first outing in Mario Kart World? Let’s just say my eyes hurt a little as I write this, and it’s not hard to figure out why…
Technology is special in so many ways, but one of its most foundational is its ability to entertain, inspire, and frankly distract us at moments we maybe need it most.
Now, do excuse me for a moment, I think I just figured out a shortcut on this circuit I’ve been stuck on and I’ve got characters to unlock…
About twelve years ago I got onto a coast-to-coast flight in the cheapest seat of the worst airline I’ve ever been on to attend a a tech event. It was equal parts Star Trek and Willy Wonka with promises of futuristic, ambient computers ready to sort your ever whim at the speak of a simple wake word coupled with literal 10-foot tall robot-arm bartenders making drinks on command… all while none other than Billy Idol performed “White Wedding” live just 15 feet from me. Yep, it was an event-slash-party done the way only Google could do, especially at a time when their geekish-whimsy was still in full bloom.
Fast forward more than a decade and things are somehow still very much the same and also wildly different.
Google I/O is still very much a thing… the goal of everyone in the room in one-way-or-another is still to build the computer from the Starship Enterprise… and, okay, admittedly Billy Idol probably didn’t make this one. Substitute A/I or Gemini for Google Assistant, Flow for Google Play Music, and Project Aura for Google Glass and we’re suddenly partying like it’s 2013!
But remember that part about it also being wildly different?
Google isn’t the teenager-of-a-company that it was in 2013. It’s many times larger, sure, but also has many times the pressure, responsibility (to shareholders), and existential threats that seem to mount more and more every day.
Gemini is coming to Chrome… but what if Google suddenly doesn’t own Chrome? Google Beam lets you hold a meeting with someone virtually as if they’re really there… but what if more and more people are just down the hall again to have a meeting with? Google AI Search will do all the Google’ing for you… until there’s no more web pages left to search because no one visits them anymore.
It’s far from a death knell, but it’s impossible to say that the air at altitudes that Google breaths isn’t getting a bit thin as time goes on. But, at the end of the day, Google took the stage, announcements were made, and we’re left (as always) to answer one question… what’s next?
It’s kind of funny, in the office lately we’ve been half-joking about being careful how you manifest things… it’s great when you “put out there” that a new project kicks off well… and it does… or you hope against all hope that a concerning trend isn’t here to stay… and it isn’t. So, should we be surprised that after weeks of lamenting the desert of gadget news we’ve been traversing… we are suddenly greeted by the relatively unexpected arrival of not one but two new Surface devices from Microsoft?
It’s no secret that we review, use, and maintain a relatively vast fleet of devices made up of every brand and logo you’ve ever heard of… and several you haven’t. Dell, HP, Acer, Asus… yep they’re all there and many times they’re really good and even great at what they do.
But some lineups… just hold a special spot in our hearts and for whatever reason Surface has just always been one of those!
From the arrival of the first Surface RT almost thirteen years ago to the latest Snapdragon-powered behemoth that arrived on our doorstep just last summer… we’ve been there for it all. A few have been great, several have been… not… and a rare couple have even been game changing (at least for the industry that was left to chase them). Like the best concept car, sometimes Surface hasn’t been about selling a certain number of units or directly moving the needle of one of the world’s largest companies… but instead about putting the channel on notice for what they could (and should) be making out of their own products.
I’m here to tell you, the laptop you have today, regardless of what it is, is better because Surface exists. Believe me.
So, when Microsoft suddenly shakes things up not with a “next generation” but instead with what appears to be novel entries in-and-around their existing lineup… well let’s just say we’ve found an oasis in the desert, and it’s about to get exciting around here!
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we realized something… odd.
We’ve mentioned it off-hand on several recent episodes, but it has come more and more into focus as the weeks have gone on. It’s quiet out there… too quiet.
Sure, we’re in the post CES, MWC, etc lull that exists every year as we wade towards Summer’s more splashy, developer-focused events like Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC… but even that expected downtime is so quiet right now, the silence is honestly deafening.
Don’t get us wrong… there’s plenty of people talking, but what’s actually being said? Switch 2 pre-orders took place… which mostly left a lot of people tired after a night of no sleep and sadly almost as many with no actual Switch 2 order with their name on it…
Companies seem to be coming out of the woodwork left and right making noise about buying a pretty ubiquitous web browser that… isn’t actually for sale yet.
And on top of all that, prices have begun to not-so-subtly fluctuate across consumer tech… from video cards to cameras… something is afoot and we’re just not so sure it’s 100% correlated to the things dominating the daily news cycle.
Are you confused yet? That’s okay, because we are to! So, for a stroll through what we’ve unceremoniously deemed the “un-News”… let’s take a crack and figuring out what the heck is going on out there…
This week on the Solid State Podcast… well there’s just no way of sugar coating it… Jet Lag reigns supreme…
See, it turns out that when you get hundreds of technology professionals together in a room on the other side of the globe for a week and tell them to turn their brains into hyper-idea-craziness mode… well the impact doesn’t fade quickly…
Events like these are special because, on paper, you have a bunch of people who are objectively "competitors" all being asked to talk freely and openly about the “secret sauce” of how we do what we do… and to be honest you’d think that would lead to a very quiet room… right?
Ohhhhh is it ever the opposite… and it is safely what I find most magical about what we get to do and call “work” every day. Nope, instead it’s opening a pandora’s box of collaboration, idea sharing, and community that I’ve only ever experienced in these multi-day caffeine-driven pressure cookers.
So when we had the opportunity to not only attend but participate and engage in just such an experience… well what do you think our answer was? Fuel up the plane, pack the bags, and figure out what the German equivalent of Monster is… (it’s Monster, by the way…)
And what, you might ask, was the actual moral here? Well, keep listening for the full story, but suffice to say the status-quo was challenged (as it should), ideals were re-affirmed (not that they needed it), and a reminder was starkly delivered that not only is there no competition in this room but instead we’re all connected by an imperative to, at the end of the day, be better…
Image with me for a moment, if you would, the start of a perfectly normal day in the “modern smart home”… Your alarm goes off right on time, and your start-of-day automation scene kicks in. Lights begin to subtly come up, adapting to eyes still very much wanting to be closed for at least 10 more minutes. The Air Conditioning goes to your preferred morning setting, while the living room TV kicks on with the morning news. After the tea kettle reaches the precise temperature for ideal steeping, reminders start arriving on your Home Screen summarizing the day ahead. Left over dishes go into the washer, and that last pesky load of laundry kicks off. Everything works, everything communicates, this is… “good”… right?
That’s the thing about smart home tech or, honestly anything in the gadget-filled world we know and often times love… when it works… it’s freakin magical!
The cost of that little slice of magic, though, is the other side of the coin… imagine once more that same scene with one vital change… last night a storm blew through and this morning the unthinkable… the internet is out…
Don’t mis hear me, we’re not talking a life-and-death “rise of the Cylons” situation here… but it’s shocking to take mental stock of everything in our homes that grind to a halt when suddenly “offline”. Will your alarm still go off on time? Automation scenes, smart lighting, and adaptable thermostats? Better be running something like Home Assistant. And more and more, even something as table steaks as that load of dirty dishes comes into question without a lifeline to the cloud.
The cost of convenience so often is security… but more and more it also seems to be one of resilience. Maybe there’s a better way?
This week on the Solid State Podcast… Spring in the air! Okay, it’s actually 80 degrees outside already, but hey that’s life in the swamp that I call home…
But historically, the Spring season also conjures memories of the time-honored tradition of, yep, you guessed it… Spring Cleaning…
For some, it’s clearing out a closet of clothes you’ll never wear again, and others its about finally clearing a path wide enough in the garage for a full-sized human to actually navigate end-to-end… but for the Solid State crew, well, let’s just say things are a little more, uhh, “gadget-y”…
Yep, for every un-used sweater my wife needs to get rid of there are easily three phones, tablets, laptops, or frankly TVs I would be better served sending off to, shall we say, “future endeavors” in someone else’s service… You know, all so I can then use the money (and reclaimed space) to buy yet more phones, tablets, laptops, and frankly… TVs……
And this got us thinking, in 2025 a TV isn’t just a TV anymore, a toaster many times isn’t just a toaster and heck… a car isn’t even just a car…
Every single one of these “smart” gadgets, devices, and appliances has, by nature, our digital fingerprint inextricably linked to them… and without a healthy dose of intentionality, that fingerprint goes right out the door with it once we sell, trade-in, or dispose of it.
As with so many things, there has to be a “right” way to go about it then, so let’s fire up those eBay accounts, clear space in the junk drawer of charging cables you know you have, and let’s see what it takes to actually sell your tech in 2025…
This week on the Solid State Podcast we’ve got a little bit of everything on tap… honestly just the way we like it!
Framework made a splash on several fronts this week with updates to its already-beloved 13” modular do-it-all and also expanded this year’s lineup to include a smaller, more accessible 12” model that… dare we say… they position as a “laptop for everyone?” And not to stop there, they rounded out the string of announcements with a… Desktop. Yep, you heard me… a modular, upgrade-focused… desktop. Now if that has you scratching your head for any number of reasons, A: you’re not alone… and B: just trust us, there’s more here than meets the eye…
Newer, faster SSDs are no tap from Samsung this week as well and, lets face it… faster is just faster… and that’s a good thing…
And last but certainly not least… the end of yet another era has arrived as we bid adieu to a product that in many ways kicked off a chain of events that led to how meetings are literally done today… this particular product just… wasn’t the one we use to do them…
All that leads to our feature though… and please do yourself a favor and preemptively unplug any and all smart speakers in earshot because, you guessed it (or maybe didn’t)… Amazon is finally ready(ish) to launch their AI/LLM/GenAI/Martian pixy-dust-infused Alexa upgrade known, yes you again guessed it… as Alexa Plus…
We probably spend too much time on this show talking about naming conventions, and I’m here to warn you today is no different, but I solemnly swear there’s more here than that even if Amazon didn’t exactly go out of their way to give us much to work with.
All that AND several tortured D&D references abound… what more can you ask for? Let’s dive in and find out…
We’ve talked many (many) times on this show about the cycle of things… and what I find very interesting at this particular moment is the relatively subtle but sudden departure from those cycles…
Take the iPhone for example… like the Tim Cook branded clockwork that it is every Fall we have an event, a new lineup of phones are announced as the next biggest thing ever to happen in tech in perpetuity throughout the universe… a week later we can pre-order them… and a week after that they’re living in our pocket for 2-3 years (or… you know, 11.5 months for some of us……)
This week however, the cycle broke. Yes, I know, we’ve had offshoot iPhone announcements in the past in the form of the “SE” line of phones. But, as I was aluding to earlier… this is different. The naming convention is ever so slightly but ever so importantly different… the parts bin this mid-cycle monster was crafted from was full of THIS years parts… and while the price has definitely gone up compared to 2022’s most recent entry, this one is actually spec’ed at a level a normal human being can use it successfully for more then 2-3 months rather than years…
So, zooming out, where is all this going and more importantly… what does it mean? This isn’t just a microcosm of Apple wanting to “change things up”, the industry as a whole see’s something at play and is racing to meet it head-on rather than be washed beneath its waves. The Smartphone-driven growth of the last decade-plus is rapidly subsiding, we’ve talked time and time again about the advanced maturity of that market, and as quote-unquote “upgrades” are getting more and more iterative the fight for every purchase is becoming almost cut throat.
Was simply slapping AI on the box going to ignite a fresh decade of consumer frenzy? Well, ask Humane…
Was making a phone magically fold in half going to convince droves of users to part with $2,000 for an impossibly fragile device? Samsung remains unsure…
All we can say is something is afoot, and when a player at the scale of Apple starts adjusting its stance to brace for impact, its past time to pay attention…
Do you remember the mid-90’s cartoon Pinky and the Brain? Stick with me here, but it was one of my favorites. Few things can illicit instant laughter from me like the ever quotable “Gee Brain, what are we gonna do tonight?” Followed by the infamous “The same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the world!”
Much like that quote found its way into just about every episode of the show, Samsung’s flagship Galaxy Unpacked event finds its way into just about every January, and with it a certain theme takes shape… what is Samsung planning for their phones this year? Why the same thing they do every year, dear listener… try to take over the world…
I don’t mean in a literal sense (mostly), but in battle for space in the average person’s pocket, Samsung can make a certain case that’s exactly what it’s done! In the United States, at least, it has de facto become the default option if you’re not carrying an iPhone, period.
And Samsung’s strategy here has been pretty straightforward… make a phone in just about every shape, size, bend, and price point you can imagine, and someone will buy it… So when its time for them to take the stage each January and show us the “next big thing” from one of the world’s preeminent technology brands, you kind of expect it to be a “big thing”, right?
Enter the reality of the situation… the smartphone market is well past maturity, and sure things like foldable screens seem like the “wave of the future”… in the end Samsung (and many others like them) have gotten very good at making a glass and metal rectangle to live in our pockets and dominate our lives.
So then, what did they have to stand up and talk about? Honestly that’s a very good question, but one thing hasn’t changed… its another year, another Unpacked, and Samsung still wants to take over the (smartphone) world…
Jeremy Clarkson once said, rather infamously on Top Gear, “New is better…”… Now he was talking about new cars being, at the end of the day, objectively better than the “classics” we love and revere with a healthy (and often rose-colored) dose of nostalgia… they may be beautiful works of art and make a great noise, but so often those same classics are uncomfortable, unreliable, and… well… just not as “good” as we remember them!
Each year at CES, it seems I end up going through the same series of emotions with the pieces of tech (and, these days, the parade of car reveals that show up) at this gadget-palooza in the desert…
I have several gadgets in my life that I continue to use quite literally every single day, and without fail each of them either have a new version or a new competitor on the scene as of about 72 hours ago… because that’s how tech works! My devices work great, they more than get the job done, and they’re all in better-than-average condition… but the newer ones are better, right?
Based on specs, this is a pretty simple conversation… The newest laptops, TVs, handhelds, and assorted gizmos are faster, lighter, and more capable across the board… seemingly meaningless AI trickery on the box notwithstanding… so they’re “better”… right?
The funny part is, I also once had an old Porsche 944… it was nothing particularly special… my “daily driver” at the time was more comfortable, wildly more reliable… and I STILL grabbed the 944 keys and drove it every chance I got…
New might well be better, but is it good? TBD…
The New Year, like so many things, seems to mean many different things to many different people… but its also not much of a stretch to say that some things are at least ubiquitous… if not universal…
Time to focus on your health? Oh do I have a thousand spam emails for you… Looking to finally make that big move in your career? Indeed’s marketing budget sure seems to hope so… Time to clean up the house and sell a bunch of the crap you don’t need and never use? Ebay will happily cut you a once-in-a-lifetime discount to do exactly that and even give you a fraction of the money back to… well… buy more crap you don’t need and will likely never use…
Some other things in tech especially, though, are just as predictable and hopefully at least a little more useful… CES starts in mere days, Samsung is loading the confetti cannons for yet another flagship unpacked event, and across the globe Product Managers are plastering whiteboards with their sure-fire bet on how their AI-driven product is going to totally work this time, revolutionize your life, and simultaneously empty your wallet…
While we may not love the spam, the scams, and the incessant promises of “It will definitely be better this year...”, it is all part of what makes this space so wild, crazy, and special.
So as we have freshly bid adieux to 2024, it’s time now to fix our sights on what we think 2025 has in store for us… I mean, am I finally going to get my flying car? Let’s find out…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we start our seemingly-annual tradition of turning our eyes forward by… looking behind us. Yep, as 2024 approaches its final days, we feel the single best way to ground our predictions for 2025 (and beyond) is to take an honest look back at the wins and losses, bangs and busts, and frankly some outright snoozers that still managed to dominate both the headlines and this very podcast through the year…
It’s safe to say that “newsworthy” and “good” are not always synonyms… to be honest it sometimes seems like they rarely are. Was it a year of AI, for example? You bet, there’s just no deny thing that. Was it the year that AI became “good” or even meaningful in our daily life? No freakin way.
And that’s just one example, it’s not a new phenomenon. For every iPod there’s a Zune, and hopefully there will be a day ahead where we look even further back, for example, at a chunk of red plastic that promised to change our lives by using the internet for us for… reasons… and say “you know what, that really was where it all began...”
But that’s ahead of us, pages of the story still to be written and that, well, is for a very different episode! Today, again, we’re going to take a stroll in reverse and see if we can figure out what central theme this “year in tech” might have had, and then see what direction it points us down the road…
We’ve all gotten that email, right? It was from someone you knew, about a topic you might even expect from them, but something just didn’t seem quite right…
Once upon a time, those suspicious emails stuck out like a sore thumb… Poor grammar, a “from” address that was longer than your monitor is wide, and no matter how giving you grandma is at Christmas time it just doesn’t seem likely that she has 15 Bitcoin to send you IF you get her your wallet address before 5pm…
Today though, with the advent of advanced AI models and an ever-increasing quantity of… well, crap coming to our Inboxes, timelines, and feeds every minute… being vigilant isn’t just a best practice, it’s becoming a key part of survival.
I wish I could say, dear listener, “Just tune in for an hour, do these five things every day, and you’ll be 100% guaranteed to be safe from cyber criminals and their hijinks…” but that would be about as big a lie as the Bitcoins promised a few moments ago…
You see, there is no silver bullet, no impenetrable shield of protection on the internet… It’s about layers of security, an ongoing need to improve and educate, and the acknowledgment that someday a real problem is going to arise and it’s up to you to have a plan in place to identify, respond, and recover from it…
These may sound like training materials for a bank, law firm, or investment advisor… and you’d be right. But they’re also sound best practices for every single one of us that intends to exist online and participate in the global web…
Now, first go update your phone, your apps, and your thermostat… then hit Play and let’s talk about how we can all protect ourselves and each other as we wrap up 2024 and continue to look for what’s ahead…
This week on the Solid State Podcast we try something genuinely novel… to provide actually useful Consumer advice…
No but seriously, please don’t ever take what we have to say that much to heart, but as we sat back to survey the landscape of “deals” out there for 2024’s Black Friday day… week… month… oh I don’t even know any more… it became exceedingly obvious that there absolutely are dollar-saving opportunities out there to be had, heck some of them are really good! The problem is, they’re surrounded by hoodwinks, half-truths, and the occasional outright Scam…
An example of what I would kindly call an entry in the “half truth” category happened to me just this week… I’ve been without a gaming-capable laptop for a little while (Don’t get me started on my journey with that Minivan-sized Razer Blade a couple years ago…), and decided it was time… so the Deal Research commenced!
What I found was a very good field of laptop options out there in 2024, with the year being pretty quiet for GPU change but a ton happening in the CPU space… which finally lead me to a tried-and-true Asus Zephyrus line…
You’d think… it’d be that easy… right? I know the make and more-or-less model… now just to find the best deal offered… or so I thought!
Instead I had to dig into Model sub-numbers, Processor SKU’s, and the occasional bribe (I mostly kid) to finally land on the exact one I wanted… which, as luck would have it… was the only model not on sale this year because, even though is a “2024” model just like the rest, that particular one only came out a couple months ago and was deemed “to new” for a discount…
So see, you can save, but its probably not on the latest/greatest option… and at the end of the day, is a couple hundred bucks off the top worth getting an inferior experience over years of use?
You’ve all been listening long enough to know what I did… and oh, by the way, there was an Open Box option that was twice as much off as the Black Friday “Deal”… just sayin…
Several years ago, a now-long-forgotten false start of a gadget in the VR / AR space made the lofty claim that they were going to “hack the GPU of the human brain”… that their technology would be so advanced as to not need display trickery, but instead leverage our minds to create digital elements and worlds around us. If that sounds like the premise to a bad Science Fiction movie… well, you did hear me say “false start of a gadget” a moment ago, right?
Funny enough, as I was considering that ill-fated device a few days ago, it occurred to me that while their implementation didn’t exactly work out… there have been wildly successful games played, worlds built, and stories told by doing exactly that for literally decades… that generated right there in our own brains, massive armies have clashed, new worlds explored, and lasting friendships made, all in vivid detail in front of our very “eyes”…
No, I’m not talking about some super-secret VR project pulled right from the pages of a never-produced Star Trek script… I’m talking about the power of story, leveraged on the processing power of imagination, and expressed in one of the most polarizing mediums around…
Yep, I’m talking about reams of paper, bags of dice in every shape, size, and count, and more painted chunks of plastic than you can shake an Orc at…
Gaming is certainly not a new topic to this show, but taking a look back at the last five decades of table top games we realized… some very talented creatives, story tellers, and mostly-sober DM’s have been hacking the GPU of our brains this entire time…
Listen… we’re not going to beat around the bush here… when Apple’s fall Mac-centric event / infomercial / whatever they are these days turned into an outright string of glorified Press Releases I was… less than optimistic…
Apple loves their “big moment on stage”… at least historically. So if their collective decision was not not even bother just mere weeks after giving minutes of stage time to a new color treatment on a year old watch, this sure seemed to be shaping up into an iPad mini level of spec-bump fueled recycled yawns…
Well, dear friends... we… were… wrong…
Do the iMac and MacBook Pro look effectively identical to their predecessors save a few new color options? Sure do.
Did we get the larger (correctly) screened iMac option I’ve been holding space for on my desk for several years at this point? Not a chance.
Was this potentially one of the most meaningful round of updates to the Mac lineup since the introduction of Apple Silicon? One hundred percent.
MacBooks Pros? Fastest, most capable lineup from the baseline to the top with more battery life than ever before.
iMacs start at enough RAM to actually recommend, get the same end-to-end performance bump, and are easier to recommend as an all-purpose hub computer than ever before.
And then, finally, the most easily forgotten Mac got the biggest upgrade of them all…
We’ve said here countless times how the MacBook Air is the “laptop for everyone” (and with 16GB of secretly starting RAM mores than every, by the way), and we’re here to tell you the Mac mini is now firmly, without a doubt, with zero direct competition, the do-all desktop for nearly everyone…
Tiny footprint, incredible horsepower, ports front-and-back (finally), and a starting price of $599?
What can I say, we’ll take two…
I think its pretty fair to say most (if not all) of us could stand to have fewer “things” in our lives… if the town you live in is anything like mine, about the only things being built en masse are places for people to live, places to wash your car, and places to store your stuff… And honestly, if we’re having to pay someone to quietly hide away all the stuff we have that doesn’t already fit in our home then, well, maybe we actually do have too much stuff…
I for sure am counted among them, and while I do survive the occasional purge of “when was the last time we used this…”, some things I just can’t part with. It might be a memento from a long-past adventure, or a seemingly worthless trinket that ties back to a now-gone loved one, and other times… it’s literally a piece of paper.To me, at least, this is no ordinary piece of paper… Sure, its a pretty typical 6” x 4” sheet of lined yellow note paper with some worse-than-average bullet points scribbled on it, but to me it’s not only something I keep, it lives proudly on a shelf of admiration.
See, once upon a time, three friends decided they talk entirely too much about tech, gadgets, games, and… well, life… and eventually they started doing it in front of a microphone and shipping it out to the internet. A few people listed, a lot of laughs were had, and way too much caffeine was consumed…
The year was 2012, the podcast wasn’t even this one, but it’s still what I think about when contemplating the origins of the Solid State Podcast and how we got here twelve years later…
So that piece of paper, it was our very first topic list from our very first episode on a show long lost to the internet, but here in 2024 I still look at that piece of paper at least once a week.
We definitely have too much stuff, but I’m going to go put this paper back up on the shelf where it belongs…
A few years ago I wrapped up a particularly crazy work day performing some seemingly “normal” tasks. Several emails were sent and received, some accounts signed up for with a new online service, and we were remotely connected to a number of servers reviewing data.
What made this specific evening different from most was the why behind those otherwise mundane tasks… The emails were being exchanged with a group of professional hackers and cyber criminals, the new accounts were for a bitcoin exchange service, and the servers we were connected to were riddled with ransomware and now-encrypted, useless data.
The worst had happened. The “if” had become “when”. A company had been attacked, the bad guys had gotten through, and we received the call to try and save the day.
Turning back the clock to “before the boom” as professionals in our space call it, the chain of events leading up to the one, terrible moment were border-line obvious and spanned years of single decisions that added up to a cocktail for disaster. A series of budget cuts led to not having the funds to authorize a modernization project that would have moved their backups immutably, to the cloud. An aging Line of Business application was “too important to risk upending” and left server infrastructure frozen in time at a now-unsupported, unpatched state. An email arrived that was hugely important, very time sensitive, and entirely fake. This, is the recipe for the very “boom” I mentioned before.
The rest was history, the hackers struck and encrypted (but didn’t steal) their data. We received the call, made every effort to find a way out of it, to find there simply wasn’t one. And, as many business staring at a potentially endgame event have done, bitcoin was purchased, the criminals were paid off, and true to their word (this time) the ability to decrypt the data was handed over and many sleepless days later business was returning to normal.
This is just one event of millions like it, and they’re getting worse every year. October, you see, is “Cybersecurity Awareness Month”, and while the vigilance we need to have never gets a break, its still good to take a beat, have the tough conversations, and decide for ourselves, our businesses, and as… people… what is the true cost of not being prepared…
PS - The link to this month's Cybersecurity Awareness "Tech Bytes" segment on SWFL's ABC 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQEQrRawnHI
This week on the Solid State Podcast things go… a little wide… I solemnly swear, we sat down for our “news” segment to simply touch on the fact that iOS 18 in all of it’s glory and missing features had dropped this week, with a little “tomorrow is new iPhone day” added in for flavor. Instead, dear friends and listeners, is a caffeine-fueled journey through our collective fix for everything wrong (apparently) in tech, media, gaming, and possibly intergalactic politics? I’m still a little fuzzy on that one…
As we burst out the other side, the thing we actually came to talk about takes shape in the early coverage of Sony’s upcoming Playstation 5 “Pro”… I know this is an audio format, but I so very sincerely hope you can both hear the air-quotes around the word and, frankly, see the eye roll now forever locked on my face…
Is it an upgrade? Is the upgrade worth the price? What does the word “Pro” even mean any more? If you think that’s all you were going to get from this week’s feature… well… yeah you guessed it… it devolved into yet a second caffeine-fueled journey through our collective fix for everything wrong (apparently) in tech, media, gaming, and possibly intergalactic politics… No, really, I have no idea…
We usually record this in the wee hours of the morning, and due to all-things-life this one hit right after 5pm on a lovely September evening… and maybe that’s the problem with us being a little too awake when the record button was pressed…
Either way, this is a fun one guys, so pause your current game of Astro Bot and let’s take a little journey…
On this week’s Solid State Podcast, well there’s no other way to say it… it’s iPhone time! We’ve talked plenty of times before about the more-or-less fixed points in each year of the Big Tech calendar, and a September Apple Event has been a tentpole of that calendar for many years now. The size and shape of those events varies year to year, sometimes with them being highly focused, phone only events and others taking shall we say… a broader approach. And boy howdy, was this one the latter.
Not to say the iPhone itself was an afterthought… not by a long shot actually. But the sheer length of the event couple with the breakneck pace of announcements did have us wondering at times if the phones were ever going to come! In the end though, as the dust settles around Cupertino, we have a shockingly wide array of new entries ranging from the barely-worth-mentioning all the way to me genuinely losing a bet …
But after you strip away the over-90-minute runtime, the plethora of products, and the “why are we even here” nature of all things AI… what we’re left with is what appears to be an Apple in a state of flux. In many ways, this was a rock-solid iPhone announcement, bringing with it one of the most compelling stories for an entry in the family in years that for once isn’t just because it’s the “most expensive so therefore ‘good’ one”… but in several other ways there’s no mistaking Apple reacting to what can only be outside pressure in some seemingly un-Apple’y ways…
We make the joke often enough about the age old tale of “change the shape or color of an iPod and we’ll sell a million more”… but that seemed to be much more tangibly the strategy here for several topics we’ll cover.
In the end though, phones were announced, reviews are on the way, and the same question we face every 12 months is upon us… is it upgrade time?
When I sit down to help someone pick out a new piece of tech, whether its a big new television, a laptop for work, or a server to run diligently in a corner for years on end, there’s one important part of the conversation that almost no-one is prepared for but, to me at least, its among the most important.
It’s not the resolution of the TV, the weight of the laptop, or the storage capacity of the server… No, it’s the supporting actors around your decision. Once we know which TV we’re going with, how is it going to be mounted? Picked a laptop? Great, what’s your docking solution look like when you’re actually in the office. And don’t me started on servers because, yes, licensing is very much a thing and you do in fact have to buy enough of it…
So when the Solid State team sat down the other day and the subject of headphones came up, I couldn’t help think about them far-too-often being the last minute decision people make. Oh they’re plenty excited about a new game console, smartphone, or other gadget but eventually you’re going to want to use that gadget in a place where broadcasting your latest kill streak in Call of Duty to the masses just wouldn’t be appropriate…
As with literally anything in tech, there are so many options out there, and price among others can be a big deciding factor. But also use case, comfort, feature set… all of these carry weight to influence a final purchasing decision.
In the end, we knew what we had to do… pull out the Monopoly money and do some shopping… as we navigate the State of Headphones in 2024…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, it’s all-Google all-the-time… thankfully not (as much) in a “how badly are they getting sued this time” kind of way, but instead with a slate of new Pixel phones, earbuds, watches, and all-things-Gemini packaged up in a launch event that in our opinion just feels… “different” in the context of those pesky lawsuits we mentioned…
Pixel itself isn’t new to Google, far from it… and their storied history of smartphone development goes much farther back even to the good ‘ol days of the Nexus program.
But with a looming threat of regulatory action changing the way Google (and tech in general) is able to conduct its business, operating Pixel as some kind of decently well-funded side project because they “have to” just isn’t likely to cut it any more. If Pixel was suddenly a standalone company with its own stock performance to defend, investors to pacify, and competitors to… well… compete with… how would it do? Would we suddenly have the next great battle for smartphone supremacy, or would Pixel fade away Back to the Future style?
Regardless of the hint of regulation in the air, this was still a gadget event and oh boy did Google deliver on that front! AI is front and center, of course… but the devices themselves have a very interesting story to tell about where Google see’s these products going, and just how they intend to get there. New devices across the lineup, a very strong looking second act in the foldable space, and supporting actor credits to a new smart watch and earbuds all add up to a fall lineup that might be (and should be) hard to ignore…
Now, I’m still trying to figure out how much storage this S24 Ultra has to properly calculate its trade-in value, the irony is I think I’ll have to Google it…
If you’ve been even remotely nerd-culture adjacent, then chances are pretty good you’ve seen an episode or twenty of Star Trek, in the case of this example the fan-favorite “Next Generation” series…
See, this re-imagining of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision from the 1960’s of a distant future of galavanting space cowboys had a pretty tall order to fill… be respectful of the original material, chart a wholly new path forward, and do it on the shoulders of a mostly unheard-of cast of actors running around in multicolored pajamas waiving handheld vacuum cleaners at aliens that almost always spoke perfect English…
Well, one of the ways The Next Generation’s writers found to tell the “same old story” in some new and interesting ways was by leaning in on the technology of this fantastical future, and as one of those kids with his eyes glued far too close to the screen for more hours than my mother ever knew about… the best expression of that even-more-future tech was this black cube of a room, criss-crossed with neon yellow lines that, at the mere prompt of a request, would place you in a perfect reproduction of just about any place you could imagine. It was called a Holodeck and, well, it was magical!
Want to see the explosion of Pompeii from a mostly-safe distance? No problem. Get in some light cardio doing hand-to-hand combat with never ending waves of vampires? Coming right up. Walk across the moon in shorts and flip flops just because you can? Okay, now this is starting to sound more like a Doctor Who episode, but I digress…
See, even in this world of fictional teleporters, Warp Drive, and 3D printers (AHEM), I mean Replicators… I was still most fascinated by a room what could place you anywhere, in any time, in the blink of an eye.
So, rewind and fast forward to 2024 and sitting on the table in front of me is a metal, glass, and fabric pair of glorified ski googles that, among many other things, claims to be able to transport me to distant worlds, see timeless pieces of art, or kick back with a re-run of Red Dwarf… all from the comfort of my living room. Is this the beginning of my childhood Holodeck dream, or an overpriced express of technology hubris over-reaching itself. Battery’s finally recharged, let’s go find out…
Quite a ways back, we did an episode about our first computers… Cody’s was recent enough to almost be usable today, Eric’s was long enough ago it arrived as spare parts that more resembled a TI calculator, and mine was right in the middle… the hallmark of mid-90’s computing it was an off-white beast of a tower with dual disk drives, fans you could hear from the driveway, and enough RAM to almost run 3 programs at once… as long as one of those programs was Calculator…
I remember everything about that computer because it was “mine”, but the one I remember possibly even more fondly than it came several years later… they had a lot in common… the tower was still obnoxiously large (just black now with a glass see-through panel on the side), it still had two disk drives but one was a DVD player now, and at the heart of it was an Intel Core2Duo “Allendale” series CPU. It had two cores (hence the “Duo”), was built on a 65 nanometer processes, and consistently hit temperatures normally reserved for the molten core of a small moon or large planet-killing space station…
All of those specs are burned into my brain because this particular computer was the first one I built entirely myself, from scratch. I had upgraded and modded my PCs for years of course, but my freshman year of college I saved every dollar I could find and built one part at a time what felt like a colossus of gaming and computing horsepower.
Today, the phone in my pocket would literally run circles around that beast many times over. But the hours I spent on that one component at its heart, choosing that “perfect CPU” was a labor of love that obviously is etched into my memory even today.
So as we look at the computing landscape right now of AI chips, “Copilot Plus” PCs, and an arms race of cores, nanometers, and TOPS figures, the common thread is the beating heart at the middle of it all. The CPU wars are in once again in full swing, and frankly there are already a few casualties. Let’s dive in…
A couple short years ago I sat down in this very chair, in front of this computer, and recorded the intro for an episode of this show. It would have been a pretty normal “day ending in Y” had it not been for the rising sound of wind outside and the fact that I couldn’t see through my office window due to the solid metal storm shutters in place.
Hurricane Ian was mere hours away from its historic landfill just miles from where I sit. I remain grateful to this day for every one of those miles, as they were in large part the difference in my ability to consider myself a responder and not a victim of what was about to come for my home.
We talked that day about “disaster tech” and the kind of gear and gadgets we would always recommend to have around for just such en event. Solar generators, cellular hotspots, and the like were all on tap. But less than twenty four hours later, my own solar generator steadfastly keeping my phone and laptop charged and at the ready, what became immediately clear was that with all the backup power in the world, the mission critical tools of our trade were effectively paperweights without one key lifeline… the internet.
This is obviously no great revelation, the reliance of business and frankly day-to-day life in America has been near wholly reliant on internet access for many years at this point. But to have it effectively and so completely disappear in what felt last an instant was technological whiplash nonetheless. People would huddle in groups at a nearby Target because one bar of cell signal was allegedly working, others would send SMS texts from internet-enabled vantage points to others that had no such access to provide sorely needed weather, recovery, and resource updates.
It wasn’t until far too long after Ian had moved on that a relatively new option started to appear in some places we sorely needed it most… a rectangle piece of metal and plastic, emblazoned with the word “Starlink”, and a single Ethernet cable coming out the other end with a promise of restoring communications for those that needed it most in a time where minutes counted for hours.
Thankfully this morning, there’s no wind to be heard and I can clearly see the beautiful morning through my un-shuttered window. But, in all reality, it will happen again. This time, though, in at least one small but very important way, we’ll be ready…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we tricked ourselves into thinking this would be a “quick one”…
See, at first you can’t really blame us… Samsung had their (formerly “Fall”, now very much Summer) Unpacked event focused on their foldable phone hardware plus a smattering of other devices and, on paper at least, it seemed like kind of a snoozer…
Screens got a little bigger, hinges got a little tougher, and some earbuds suddenly got very familiar looking… but other than that “business as usual” sure seemed to be the name of the game this year.
And honestly, that still might end up being the case, but as we’ve seen happen several other times across the industry and the years, we can’t help but wonder if the sum total of the changes, additions, and updates add up to… I don’t know, “more”!
Throw in that on top of all that AI keeps shoving itself to the forefront of the “feature list”, and Samsung frankly just lobbed a ring-shaped grenade into Oura’s back yard, yelled YOLO, and added yet another seemingly-compelling reason to pitch your tent in their every-growing walled garden and hope for the best.
We say it around here all the time, two companies “competing” isn’t a healthy field of competition, but at the very least Apple and Samsung do keep incentivizing each other to do one thing better and better… as long as that thing is “looking more and more alike”…
Again, there might just be more there than meets the eye, or it may be a year to kick back, keep enjoying last year's phone, and hope next time things get a little more interesting. Let’s see if we can find out which one we’ve got on our hands here in 2024…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we mix things up a little bit…
Not just by constantly going off the rails, because let’s face it you just expect that at this point. Instead we’re opening up with what’s “in the news”, specifically on a relatively sudden resurgence in the physical film photography industry. New camera bodies to choose from, old and new names returning to the table with novel takes on film roles, and yet another perspective on our ongoing question of “what is a photo” in this world of generative AI, computational photography, and more. In a world where every other post to Instagram is more fiction-than-fact, is a cell of film that (for better or worse) captures a moment “as it really was” suddenly more valuable than ever?
On then to our feature topic this week, and it’s none other than a “what’s in the box” style review of Meta’s seemingly fantastic Wayfarer AI-powered smart glasses. These are hardly a “new” gadget, in fact they’ve been on store shelves for quite some time now but it feels like the true moment around them is just now starting to heat up. Meta continues to steadily improve the software, add features, and somewhat-quietly build out one of the most compelling wearables on the market today.
Last but certainly not least, Eric and I wrap things up with a heartfelt nod to one of our industry’s greats with an homage to the very moments that made the intersection of technology and the humanities the core of what we do…
With no further ado, on to the show…
I’ve unboxed a lot of gadgets through the years… maybe too many? Okay, that’s a lie, and one of them I sincerely will never forget was shockingly almost 12 years ago when a box arrived on my desk from Microsoft that contained, in their minds at least, the next-big-thing in Personal Computing…
See, just a couple years prior, a certain company in Cupertino changed the landscape with the announcement of a slab of metal and glass that ran apps, had a decent(ish) web browser, and a battery that lasted seemingly forever. In all honesty, they couldn’t actually do all that much compared to even a run-of-the-mill laptop of the day, but there was still something there. Something new, special.
Microsoft, of course, had to have a response to in the Fall of 2012 Surface was born. Now, because it is Microsoft after all, it couldn’t be a total reimagining of what a computer does because, well, a lot of people use PCs and they expect their software to run even if it was last updated during the Clinton administration…
So what made the box that arrived that day special was that this was, even for Microsoft, something different. This particular “Surface” device, as it was called, was the “RT” model… a name almost as confusing as the device itself. It ran Windows… kind of. It could run many of the applications I needed… sort of. And the performance should be top notch… occasionally. Because beating at the heart of this “RT” model was an ARM based processor unlike any seen in a Microsoft device before, the same core type running in Apple’s now-wildly-popular iPad.
Sadly what we did get was a hot, slow, incompatible device, but one that still represented the beginning of a journey, that so far has now led to the launch of Copilot Plus PCs, a series of both first and third party offerings in Microsoft’s latest Windows-on-ARM attempt. Battery life? Check. Compatibility? Pretty darn good. Performance? Oh yeah…
It was a long road to get here from that ill-conceived paperweight in 2012, but man, this is getting interesting…
If it hasn’t come up before (and I’m pretty sure it has), we really love to cover tech events around here… they’re gadget-fueled bonding experiences that have a history littered with moments ranging from the first iPhone to the Surface RT, game changing shows of force like the original Nintendo Switch announcement to the “less than well received” debut of the Xbox One… there’s just something electrifying about the origin of a new product, service, or category that (for better or worse) are going to impact millions of lives, guide the course of countless businesses, and one way or the other take their rightful place in the history of our industry…
Apples World Wide Developer Conference is a literal breeding ground for exactly these types of moments… From the addition of copy/paste on the iPhone (no, I’m not kidding) to a literal on-stage funeral for Mac OS 9, the intersection of showmanship and spectacle are not uncommon here. This year is both a continuation of that tradition, and a stark reminder of how much things have changed all at once.
You can’t kick off an “event” with several Apple Executives alleging to jump out of a plane to a rock music score and not feel at least a little like a kid in a silicon candy store… but on the flip side, these are now fully pre-produced, scripted, and rendered infomercials that, while still almost two hours long, lack the personality and dire stakes of an on stage demo of a feature that may or may not quite work if the Wifi crashes in the event hall again…
But, in the end, another WWDC is upon us, and with it the cardinal direction for one of tech (and the world's) largest companies along with glimpses at what will fuel our gadget-centric experiences in the coming year.
Flip those updates to “Beta”, let’s check it out…
It’s no secret, we’ve talked a lot about iPads lately… first it was what did we want Apple to announce… then it was what did Apple actually announce… and now, today, we’ve spent the last two weeks hands-on with those very devices and guess what… we still don’t feel we’ve got the whole story…
I’ll cut to the chase… these devices are great. They’re thin, light, fast, rock incredible displays and in every measurable (physical) way… they’re the best iPads ever made. But then something funny happens… you actually start using the device. Apps might load just a little bit quicker. My favorite streaming shows might be just a little more vibrant. The battery life… is still “fine”. But it is, at the end of the day, still an iPad. I still can’t load the applications I want, drag windows where I want them, or come up with a single thing to actually make this M4 processor break a sweat. Because… it’s still an iPad.
It’s entirely possible that’s exactly how Apple wants it, too. For us to keep strolling through the walled garden, downloading apps and paying for more iCloud storage until the end of time. But if that’s the story, then why do some of these models exist in the first place? Do you need an M4 processor to play Candy Crush? Or an aluminum-decked keyboard with haptic touchpad to scroll through Facebook?
There remains a contention here, between what we know full-well these devices seemingly can do and what they’re actually (and artificially), able to do…
WWDC looms just a few short weeks in the distance, and with it hopefully some answers. In the meantime though, the products have shipped, they’re in our hands, and the only question we can actually pose now is, was it worth it?
I will admit, some weeks I struggle more than others to come up with this intro… occasionally though, the struggle is still real, but very different… how do I keep it shorter than the podcast itself?
This is absolutely one of those weeks, because with Event-season in full swing and announcements coming in left and right, to say we’ve got plenty to talk about is beyond an understatement. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have all had major events in the last week, and the implications of those announcements will be felt for the next year or more. Throw in the impending collapse of Humane and its AI pin, a slew of new laptops dropping in just a few short weeks, and Google has a very unique suggestion for my next pizza recipe… what more could I ask for?
Well, see… that’s where things continue to get interesting. As exciting as time as it is, there also seems to be a cloud hanging just in sight over it. Major companies are simultaneously announcing the products that will usher them into their next era… at the same time they’re quietly performing massive layoffs. Tentpoles of our daily technology life are re-inventing their core products… possibly at the cost of the very user experience that made them a gold-standard in the first place. And to top it all off, AI in general continues to be the only measure anyone wants to apply to a products viability in the market while those same products continue to stumble on the most basic of tasks while having little-to-no remorse for the half-baked errors…
What we have here, is a good-old-fashioned market shift… the bets are all down, the hands are dealt, and the biggest question remaining is… does anyone have the guts to raise, or is it time to show our hand? Let’s find out…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we engage in a bit it of loose “deja vu”… You might remember last time we were together it was all-things-iPad, but more specifically what we felt the future of the iPad should look like. No true predictions, certainly nothing based on facts or even strong rumors, just if Cupertino were foolish enough to turn their iPad factory over to three gadget nerds for a year, what would come out the other end?
Fast forward just a few short days, and the world watched as Apple… published a pre-recorded video to tell us what they see as the future of the iPad.
Fancy new displays that are supposed to be the new gold standard in content consumption? Check.
Fill out the middle of your lineup with bigger, cheaper models that still have enough horsepower to run a small datacenter… so you can play Candy Crush a bit faster? Oh yeah.
A top-end price point that literally made my wallet shriek in fear? Sadly… can confirm.
See from Apple’s point of view, it seems the iPad lineup is “right where they want it”… a shape, size, and price point for nearly everyone. But looking back to our episode just a couple weeks ago, we can’t help but ponder the question “why?” as we consider the most capable of these new offerings. Do you really need an OLED display to watch the next season of House of the Dragon? Is an AI-focused M4 processor the missing ingredient to faster scrolling on Instagram?
We just keep coming back to one conclusion… this announcement, well its Part 1…
The other side of this cliffhanger seems to be looming in June’s WWDC, but in the meantime, there’s new iPad hardware to play with and for better or worse, let me go find my wallet…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we grab our crystal ball and do our best to tune in to the future… a future of one device to rule them all, a single metal and glass slab that pops into a keyboard case, runs every app imaginable, and seamlessly transitions into a productivity workhorse at the literal push of a button…
See, Apple would happily have us believe that this exact device already exists on store shelves across the world… if you’re willing to buy an iPad Pro, snap it into their “magical” case, attach an Apple Pencil, take out a second mortgage on hour hose to afford all the above… and use Stage Manager to do some semblance of multi-windowed work… yeah, we’ll pass on that last one too...
All kidding and crystal balls aside, there really is an Apple event coming up in just a few short days and we found ourselves dreaming endlessly this week about, if it were up to us how would this event go? Not based on predictions, supply chain rumors, and hard research… just… what if?
What if the iPad had a case that allowed your tablet to sometimes… be a tablet? What if the camera wasn’t seemingly positioned to deliver the single least-flattering angle in consumer tech? What if the operating system could actually run this amazing, world changing application called a real browser? We realize some of this is bordering on science fiction… but dare to dream, right?!
Truly, the iPad feels at a crossroads… with no new devices in 2023 at all and mounting competition for “what is a computer” across the technology landscape… is Cupertino going to trot out a slimmed down chassis with a fancy new screen and call it a day? Or is there potentially more at play here? It seems we’ll know for sure week after next, but in the meantime, let the dreaming commence…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we play a little game of “What if” versus “What’s next”… See, we’re at an interesting time of the year where most of the big announcements are still to come… sure CES has come and gone, some phones have hit the market, and freshly Copilot-emblazoned laptops are among us… but really, the majority of what 2024 does (or doesn’t) have in store for us is still to come…
AI has obviously been at the core of the conversation for some time now, but as we’ve touched on in the past, the reality of it is so much more than a chatbot and some generative AI “artwork”… we’ll soon reach a point where tangible products on physical warehouse and store shelves will usher these emerging technologies onto our desks, into our pockets, and if at least one company has anything to say about it… onto our chests…
You’ve likely heard by now that a new player in the space named “Humane” has launched is AI pin, and if nothing else it’s caused quite a stir… sadly it’s just for all the wrong reasons. Reviews are, to be kind, universally negative and considering its price point, ongoing expense to operate, and seemingly half-baked feature set, one could be forgiven for asking what are we even doing here…
But, as we’ve talked about so many times on this show, the story of so many products and entire categories that we know and enjoy every day started with crash and burn reviews, disastrous “first generation” launches, and sometimes years of iterative updates and tweaks… anyone remember the first generation Galaxy Fold?
Now, we’re also not saying this will necessarily be the story of Humane… they’re still a startup burning a finite pile of investment capital that, some day will need to make a product capable of moving units and generating profits… Maybe it will, maybe this will be one more entry into the long line of false-start launches. But what is all but guaranteed is what they’re working towards, this AI enabled device future, is here to stay…
So with the reviews rolling in, we couldn’t help but ask ourselves what else is still ahead in 2024? One quarter in the answer is, simply, a lot! We touch on just a few here today, but suffice to say, this is going to be a busy one…
Now, the real news of that day, actually, is that it’s my dear wife’s birthday… and shocker to no one I have playlists to craft, food to order, and an event to create out of thin air… if only AI could help me with that?
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we go a little bit… wide….. You should be used to it by now, but especially on what many consider a “slower” time of year for tech news in general we saw it as a good opportunity to slow down and have an earnest conversation about a company that we normally have on the show in the context of a new device, gadget, or service that we can’t wait to hand over our money in exchange for…
Except this time, that same company is in hot water with none other than the United States Department of Justice for, objectively, that very same reason… see Apple has built an empire of a business out of delivering a product that quote-un-quote “just works” except that it frankly “just works” with other products and services from none other than Apple itself…
Want this most seamless audio pairing? Buy some AirPods… Don’t like AirPods? Buy some Beats… and ignore that they too, are from Apple. Take more than 2 and a half photos with your shiny new iPhone and therefore have “run out of storage”… iCloud will happily solve that for you. Oh, and all those apps that make the phone great in the first place, our store is the one-and-only place to get those…
See, when you start boiling it down to the ridiculous, the case here suddenly feels pretty cut-and-dry… If you want blue bubbles, backups that work, games to play, and a watch that does more than tell the time… have we got a bundle for you...
And that is where things don’t just get interesting, they get familiar… because another tech behemoth once decided that playing in their walled-garden was a sure path to preserving their market dominance… until the DOJ showed up, locked them in a court room for three years, and changed theirs (and many others) business forever… The case simply said the United States versus Microsoft, the year was 1998, and, other than that… well, we’ll just let history speak for itself…
Now, excuse me while I got look for a lightning cable to charge my keyboard because… that just makes sense...
“Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic”… it’s a quote we’ve all heard countless times and these days is dangerously close to becoming overused if not outright tired… but even so, it remains one of my favorites because its founded in so much truth…
I remember the first time I put on an Oculus Rift developer kit and was suddenly transported to a far off world, it was nothing less than magic…
I also remember the first time I dialed into a local telephone number with a modem and was suddenly connected to a global network of computers, servers, and data just waiting to be absorbed… one very slowly loading page at a time…
Those two examples were separated by a mere fifteen or so years, but they were both pivotal in my personal technological development as well as steps down a road that had led us to where we are today… a rapidly growing market of chat bots, “smart” assistants, and quote-unquote photographs containing ever-fewer glimpses of a scene “as it really was”…
It’s certainly no question that the concept of AI is here to stay, that it is only going to continue developing, and for many, here-and-now, it’s nothing less than magical…
Type a prompt or two into a box, and get back sometimes awe-inspiring artwork… provide mountains of data, and generate reports, summaries, and presentation-grade material… ask for the perfect scrambled egg recipe and, well sadly, still get 7 conflicting recipes for ever-more-runny eggs…
So the question we’re here to ask today is, are we there yet? Has our AI-laced future truly arrived or are we barely in its infancy? Are we just two or three GPT iterations away from a post-scarcity paradise, or two or three steps down a road with miles still to go ahead?
We’re launching what we think will be a tool we use more and more frequently, a measure or sorts to answer the question (for now) where exactly are we on the “Fad or Future” scale for AI?
Several aspects of the “human condition” will forever remain funny to me… one of which is our never ending desire for “the next best thing”… when I was a kid I distinctly remember dreaming of a future promised to me by the Science Fiction tv shows, movies, and books of the day… communicators, video calls, holodecks… I wanted it all!
So now, in 2024, I sit here with my smartphone beside me that can place me in contact with anyone I’ve ever met, complete with a built-in camera that places them in front of my eyes at the push of a button, and just beside it is a white and black contraption of plastic and glass that, when pulled over my face, has the ability to transport me to far off worlds, impossible realms, or even a 3D rendered conference room in a virtual high rise overlooking a city that doesn’t exist…
With all of that near-magical technology at my fingertips, is it bad (or even wrong) that my first inclination is to stare at that headset and ask the question… why isn’t this better? Why aren’t people clamoring to spend every spare moment exploring a digital frontier that is limited only by the imagination and creativity of the developers on the other end…
That same kid in the 90’s that craved “the future” would have picked up my headset, turned it on, and never wanted to come back! The “me” of 2024 though, can hope on a good day to make it an hour before the headaches set it, the edges of vision start to get far too blurry, and the “off” button starts calling my name. But this is the promise of the technology, right? The next one is going to crack it, the displays will improve, the latency edging close to zero… we’re so close!
The questions that remain, though, is what is close? Does camera tech need to evolve? Is placing an 8K display millimeters from my eyes the answer? Or is there something just beyond the horizon that stands to disrupt everything we think we know about Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality?
They call it the metaverse, I call it a fun way to spend exactly one hour at a time, but that kid will never stop dreaming of it being “the future”…
Several years ago, we had a fire in our garage that claimed several of our cars… I am (if you haven’t figured it out yet) something of a creature of habit… So, seeing as a very much liked the truck I drove at the time, I promptly went down to the dealership, worked with Insurance, and purchased effectively the same truck I had sadly lost. It had, for all intents and purposes, the same engine, the same tires, the same… everything.
But, for some reason, to this day I can remember that first drive home from the dealership and thinking to myself that no matter how hard I tried, I knew this was a new vehicle, a different truck…
The engine, while identically spec’ed, picked up off the line just a little bit different. The first few turns on the way home, and I felt the suspension sway in subtly different ways. Even the electronics seemed to respond… differently. Not necessarily better, certainly not worse, but in the end not the same.
Now, if this feels even more off the rails, you’re not wrong but I promise to bring it full circle… because this week I had such a similar experience I couldn’t help but go back to that drive home…
See, sitting on my desk were two MacBooks… both identical in design, build quality, and materials. The screen was the same resolution, the keyboard switches unchanged… the only difference between these two devices was, in all fairness, their heart. With Apple upgrading their smash-hit Air line of MacBooks this week, even they knew it wasn’t the most “event worthy” affair… instead we got a pretty forgettable press release, and a smattering updates to the Apple Store website promising the best MacBook Air yet.
And you know what, I think they’re right… these laptops look identical, feel identical, but don’t perform identically… and that could be a big deal to a lot of people. Is it a game changing “revolution of the laptop space?” Absolutely not, not even close… but when you already make the oft-described “laptop for everyone”, every refinement should put the broader market on notice, there’s a new MacBook Air in town…
There are a lot of tired cliches in the world… everything from “bring an umbrella and it won’t rain” to “a watched pot never boils”… but the funny apart about them is often times they feel like an inescapable truth of reality! I know full well keeping an umbrella in my car is not going to keep the sun shining, but I swear to you my tea kettle only heats up if I leave the room…
So when we start talking about “layers of security”, it sometimes feels like we’re doing nothing more than parroting back old, tired clichés... constantly advising people to “slow down to speed up” or the classic “you can’t help those that won’t help themselves”… but really these reminders to stay vigilant, to be mindful about the threats that surround us in the hyper-connected world we live in are as valuable today than ever before…
So what then, does all this have to do with today’s episode? Well we’re here to talk about a topic that is both near-and-dear to my heart and also comes off as about as dry and boring as something can be… Encryption…
It’s a word that, like so many others in tech, has nearly lost all meaning to the average person… they know it exists, it sounds kind of important, and they’re pretty sure they’re using it… right?
And there, in the end, is the problem… the techno-babble of it all has reduced a very important piece of day-to-day protection to a seemingly table steaks security function that many could be forgiven for assuming is just “there all the time”, requires zero setup or upkeep, and “just works”…
Sadly, this couldn’t be less true, and the conversations about where, when, and how to encrypt your data and messaging has never been more crucial, or more at risk…
I swear we keep this more-or-less light and on the rails, but the lesson at the core of it all is one too important to gloss over… slow down, be safe, and take an active role in securing your digital self…
Now, I did just wash the car yesterday, so let me go find an umbrella to throw in the car before heading out…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, we’re trying something a little bit different, while shockingly still the same…
See we realize, very intentionally, this show covers a lot of ground. From big tech to tiny brands you’ve never heard of, game changing gadgets to video game controllers… it’s all over the map…
And much of the time, those stories are relatively one-and-done… Samsung announces a new phone, and people buy it… Canon refreshes a camera, and it’s shockingly similar to the last one… The tech giants unleash AI on the world, and the Cylons are born… and so the cycle continues!
Every so often, though, it’s not quite that simple… We’d love to truly predict the future, but what fun would that really be? So when a company actually surprises us and goes another direction, or a product undersells but over-delivers (or, sadly sometimes, the other way around…), the story isn’t over just yet!
Here we are then, with a new episode format that we hope you’ll like (or at least tolerate) and that we mostly-solemnly-swear not to over use… the idea of doubling back, checking in, and bringing things Full Circle to topics we’ve touched on already, but turned out to need a second look.
To kick things off, then, this week we’re checking in with Eric for an update on his ongoing journey with the FreeWrite family of “distraction free” typing products, we close-the-loop on last week’s Xbox “business update” announcements, Fuji finally updated its unexpected bombshell of a camera in the X100 series, and round things out with the latest from Palworld and how, somehow, they’ve managed to remain to-date un-sued…
So let’s go find out where these products and announcements really landed… buckle up, hang on…
Loss is one of the most inescapable aspects of the human condition… so many things that we have and enjoy can, in any number of ways, “go away” someday… Now that’s not meant to start this weeks episode off on a down note, but the stark reality is one that we often try to ignore until it rears it head…
This afternoon, Microsoft will be taking to the internet-airwaves (in Podcast form, no less) to announce, in their own words… an “Xbox Business update”… and the question on everyone’s mind is, frankly, what does that actually mean?
Companies call events all the time, and they’re announced in countless different ways from out-of-the-blue emails to worldwide Ad spots… the concept of it being a “business update” though carries a tone that is different, unfamiliar, and I hate to say almost concerning…
Xbox as a brand means a lot to us, as gamers and as professionals in the technology space, and to consider a world without it is nothingness than just sad…
But that’s where the question marks really start flowing… is this the “end of Xbox”, is it the birth of something entirely new, or is this just the weirdest grab at the public attention span in recent memory? We’ve got an abundance of theories on that one, and let’s face it, if you’re listening to my voice right now changes are that’s what you’re here for!
Circling back to loss real quick, when the “thing” is suddenly no longer there, the other inescapable truth is that space has been created for something entirely new, possibly even great… and later today maybe we’ll find out which we’re going to get…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, there’s no getting around it… we’re all over the place in (hopefully) all the best ways possible!
We kick things off by taking a hands-on look at the Free Write Alpha, a device with an intentionally narrow vision of what it wants to be and how it might unlock the creativity laying dormant in our ever-more distracted minds…
Then things really go off the rails as we journey back to a world of cassette tapes, questionable audio quality, and… believe it or not… gadgets hitting the market right now enabling you to play those chunks of plastic and ribbon in new and interesting ways…
Hot on the heels of such a stark look backwards is a whiplash-ridden transition to what lies ahead for AI, this time when its baked into the phone that many of you already have in your pocket… Yep, Apple is “making it official” with AI focused tools coming to iOS later this year… What that actually means however is still very much up for interpretation… is this ushering in another era of once-complicated tools arriving for the masses, or the next step down an ever-darkening road…
Things only get more off-the-walls from there when the next way to scratch your Dungeons & Dragons itch digitally arrives later this year in Project ORCS, and who knows… maybe we sneak a few more tidbits in at the end… guess you’ll have to wait to find out? No… really… don’t just scrub ahead… I promise it’s worth it!
All that and more coming up, if you thought the intro was bad, wait until you see what this much caffeine on a Friday morning did to us… let’s go check it out…
We’ve talked many times on this show about how the smartphone space is reaching a state of… let’s call it “advanced maturity”… On any given day you can pick up just about any given mainstream “flagship” phone and you’re going to more-or-less have the same experience… a (normally) over-sized slab of metal, glass, and plastic that powers on to become a gateway to the internet…
But even in this period of same-phone-different-day experiences, there is just enough room for a standout… an opportunity to push the space one step further than the competition and, quite frankly, be different!
That moment very much describes the one I had when I first unboxed the subject of today’s show… on parting the cardboard and peeking what was inside, visually I was greeted by exactly what I expected… a dark metal rectangle… However it was when I picked it up I was immediately aware that this wasn’t you’re every day pocket(ish)-sized super computer…
The heft hit me first, it was weighty in the hand in a way that harkened back to the days of my first iPod, when the perceived value and quality of the object was identifiable in the sum of its parts… once powered on, the screen came to life in near-perfect blacks and popping colors that, put simply, delighted the eyes…
Things really get interesting as you fly through setup, download apps with ease, and begin noticing the thoughtful touches in the operating system guiding you to new features, potentially game-changing AI enhancements, and suddenly the “why” behind this device is coming into focus…
This device isn’t just a flagship… its a tour de force to showcase everything single party trick one of the world’s largest technology brands can pack into that dark metal rectangle…
So lets find out, just what is in the box with Samsung’s brand new Galaxy S24 Ultra…
On this week’s Solid State Podcast, your three presenters get a much-needed chance to “return to form” after a seemingly endless run of events, announcements, and New Year coverage… and we figured there was not better way to do that than a good-old-fashioned "Parts Bin" episode to sprint through everything else happening in tech as 2024 gets up to speed…
Apple news kicks things off with both ends of the the spectrum… a look back at 40 years of the Mac and what that meant in 1984, how it is still shaping Apple and the industry as a whole today, and a closer look at what impact we expect to see over the coming years and, more than likely, decades to come...
But as fun as it is looking back on all the fond years with Apple’s storied lineup of desktops and laptops in seemingly every shape and size, the iPhone is really where their impact is felt on the daily by countless millions across the globe. And with great footprint comes even greater responsibility as the iPhone also remains on of the most stolen pieces of consumer tech… and the latest version of iOS is here to beef up security should it happen to you…
Contrary to popular belief though, there is plenty more going on across tech than just Cupertino has to share with us… the lens wars are heating up for Canon’s RF series, as are the mounting pile of legal bills… the gaming world has been invaded by small, animated creatures that you catch in a ball, "definitely" aren’t Pokemon, and sometimes carry… guns… and Nvidia gives its 40-series of graphics cards a “super” upgrade that may or may not be all it’s cracked up to be…
If that seems like a lot, you haven’t seen anything yet… let’s go...
Most groups of friends have their go-to inside jokes… the things you know will get a rise out of someone because, frankly, they just know you that well… my inner circle is no different: for some its a favorite sports team not performing well, others its pointing out the oh-so-specific OCD’s that make us “tick”, and for me, well, anyone who knows me well enough can walk up on any given day, ask me how many phones I’m carry, and prepare for a good chuckle at my well-deserved-expense…
My love of gadgets is, literally, very well documented at this point… and one of my favorite sub-genres is the smartphone. These roots go so much deeper than just the “modern” era ushered in by the iPhone, Nexus One, and Galaxy Note… I still have the fondest of memories for my HTC “Star Trek”, BlackBerry Curve, and even the “giant” Nokia 1520…
So in the here-and-now, the smartphone space has indeed “matured” to the point of, dare some say, getting “boring”? They all look… pretty much the same. They are all… pretty much just as fast. And the cameras are all… well, creating just about as many pixels as they’re actually capturing anymore. But I still love them…
Until someone actually cracks the “next big thing” in consumer electronics, the metal & glass slab in your pocket will remain one of the most valuable touch-points in our everyday computing experience.
So, much like the clockwork it is, Samsung brought us their Winter “Unpacked” event this last week and with it three new phones that sure look familiar, talked up AI advances that might be hit-or-miss at best, and even teased an upcoming wearable that might actually shake things up a bit… Sound like business as usual? It surely does, and I still love every last second of it… let’s dive in…
It’s a new year on the Solid State Podcast, and we’re kicking it off the only way we know how…
In the middle of the Nevada desert, surrounded by a halo of lights that never sleep, are miles and miles of convention center halls, meeting rooms, and shadowy corners where once a year a critical mass of the technology industry descends with their wares, ideas, and moonshots to pitch the rest of the world that their product is the next game changer…
Whether your corner of tech is giant TVs, impossibly complex gadgets, or a toilet that reads you the news… this Mecca of technical wizardry is second to none other.
And then, as quickly as it appeared, in a few short days it will disappear beneath the sands of the desert and time itself until another January finds us to start the process all over again.
We, of course, are talking about CES or the “Consumer Electronics Show”… many big events have come and gone over the decades, but CES stands as the beginning of the gadget-filled year, and this was certainly no exception. It would take a week’s worth of back-to-back episodes to try (unsuccessfully) to cover it all, and frankly not even I can talk that much… So instead your three occasionally-lovable presenters have decided to gather our favorites (good, bad, and most definitely ugly) to give you just a taste of not only what CES has in store for us, but 2024 as a whole…
Much like Apple disrupting the news cycle while not even being quote-unquote in attendance, let’s peruse the store shelves of tomorrow by taking a look at what CES 2024 has for us today…
There’s no other way to say it… 2023 was a year. Frankly, at times it literally felt like a year and a half…
It’s been a year of incredible highs and rock-bottom lows, as the technology industry has come to terms with a dramatically changing market and economic landscape while also charging forward (possibly with semi-reckless abandon) into an AI-fueled future that no one actually seems sure what it will look like but everyone somehow agrees its where we want to be?
We are in our happiest place dreaming of the future, and today is no different. We’re going to take a look at what’s a seemingly sure-bet in the coming year and some… wilder predictions as well because, at the end of the day, it’s still us after all!
But as forward-looking as we love to be, it’s also impossible to have a clear understanding of what could be ahead without the context of where we’ve come from. From handheld gaming to Spatial Computing and the Metaverse, 2023 not only held some fantastic releases that we’re already enjoying today but also are a pretty clear map at what’s next…
Smartphones, headsets, consoles, and… yep… even physical media, it’s all here on-tap for a new year that prepares to kick off next week with CES in Las Vegas and then rolls into new Galaxy phone announcements, Humane’s AI pin launch, and beyond…
This year has been, to put is simply… fun… so what does that mean then for 2024? I’m ready…
There’s no easier way to say it… we buy a lot of tech on this show! It is, after all, literally or jobs… but long before that, from childhood it has been our collective passion. We’ve talked on this very show about our earliest PCs, most treasured gadgets, and the genuine love we have for the silly plastic and metal boxes of components strewn through our lives…
On the flip side of that, of course, is that much of this tech isn’t exactly cheap, either! So in the spirit of the holiday shopping season and hoping to help in any small way to stretch each hard earned dollar every way we can… we set ourself a challenge!
Imagining a world where our respective collections of gadgets, screens, and technical wizardry suddenly disappears in a Thanos-style snap… How would we rebuild? In a series of declining price targets, could we stretch each purchase and hit a budget? Or were we doomed to Solid State style analysis-paralysis and a never ending want for bigger/faster/more powerful?
Our pile of would-be Monopoly money in hand, we set to every online storefront we could find over the last three days, picking through everything from “Buy it today before it’s gone forever” sales to a seemingly never-ending stream of outright scams and too-good-to-be-true hoodwinks.
But for professional technology consultants who help others build budgets, procure tech, and make sure it's working properly for years to come… how hard could it be?
Let’s find out…
Some sights are just not uncommon, and this time of year possibly the most common site is a small (or not so small) pile of cardboard boxes adorning the front step of about every house you walk by in any given neighborhood…
Sometimes its purely pedestrian… I will publicly admit I have a recurring box of paper towels sent to said doorstep because, sadly, I can’t be bothered…
But, as I alluded to before, this time of year is just a little bit different… And no, I don’t even mean that several of the largest gift-exchanging holidays are among us… oh no… it’s the peak of gadget season! As each of those long-awaited announcements take place, we get to spend time agonizing over where we are going to place our bets… and by our bets I mean the hard-earned dollars the result in said cardboard boxes arriving! With new and interesting tech arriving on the scene near-daily this time of year, being somewhat picky becomes a matter of pure practicality! Sometimes we guess well, sometimes we guess very well, and other times… yeah, we don’t talk about those...
This go around, much like Indiana Jones in a room full of ornate cups, I feel we chose… wisely!
Two of the biggest gadgets of the season are here in the room today, each connected by the fact that they’re not a brand new category, offering, or obviously evolution in their space. No, these are second and third generation entries into a market quickly filling with competition and everyone else’s “next big thing”…
So how do they stack up against both the market and their own predecessors? Let’s find out by charging up, powering on, updating… again… and hitting the digital road with the Steam Deck OLED and Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset…
Some stories around tech are entirely too predictable because, well… there are humans involved and at the end of the day there’s just only so many ways for us to try and on-up each other. That said, when the story starts to involve a nonprofit, a holding company, a very much for-profit company, a multi-trillion dollar investor, and the whole thing revolve around the future of Artificial Intelligence… well… that’s a cocktail of Unpredictability that boggles the mind…
And shockingly, that’s exactly what we’ve gotten over the last 96 hours or-so as its relates to its former Board, current Board, former CEO, and current CEO that, oh by the way, happen to be the same person…
AI as a whole is obviously the story of the day, as can be seen in our last two weeks of topics alone… yet as visionary, industry changing, and quite possibly terrifying as the future of AI is, there are still humans at the core of its development. Humans and their own views on what’s right or wrong, good or evil, or heck just smart or stupid…
The last few days have been a whirlwind, and not to cheat ahead but I genuinely believe this story is far from over, but regardless we’re going to dive in and at least start to unravel the players, the chess moves, and both the near and long-term implications of how this appears to be playing out…
Hold on tight, cause this is a bumpy one…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, the full band is back together and we’re here to pick back up on the ever-evolving conversation around AI and more specifically the marketplace that is beginning to take real shape around it.
Ever since it burst onto the scene last fall, AI has continued to dominate the moment around products, services, and the companies that bring them to you. It seems that no member of Big Tech can take the stage without working in some aspect of their broader AI play… be it supercharging their existing virtual assistant, enabling users to literally create content out of thin air, or simply provide the tools to doze off in your weekly team meeting and have a convenient (albeit contextually incomplete) summary for when you wake up…
The only inescapable fact is that these products aren’t going anywhere, but possibly even more important is the supporting cast of platforms, services, and infrastructure that are inevitably building up around “AI”… You see the average user doesn’t care (or want to care) that asking Chat GPT a question sets off a string of cloud-based events that spin up servers, transfer data, and in the end costs someone (or many someones) money…
So while the public-facing version of this race is “who can make the most game-changing AI experience first”, the whole other side of that very same race is “who can create the best, most efficient infrastructure to enable it… and do so profitably”…
For better or worse, this moment is upon us, and in typical Solid-State-style we’re going to interrogate every angle and ask ourselves (and you) the question… if we’re finally “here” with AI, should we have come in the first place?
This week on the Solid State Podcast, Eric and I go a bit rogue and record a whole episode… well, there’s no other way to say it… without Cody’s permission…
It’s the classic podcasting story… one presenter gets so excited about a bit of news and messages his co-presenter at an ungodly hour of the morning… and the next thing you know the cameras are rolling and the mics are plugged in, its time to record…
Now you might think, on the list of things that would result in such a last-minute “go live” it would be things like a surprise iPad announcement, a sudden video game drop, or the leak of tech’s “next big thing”… Well, try not to be too disappointed when I tell you, its none of those things… not even close…
See, we’ve already done a recent installment in our ongoing “What is a Photo” series of topics, and when Sony announced a camera that is all but certainly going to tell a sizable portion of that story, we couldn’t resist! The camera itself is more than you’re likely ever going to want to spend, and is jam-packed with features you’d almost certainly never use… but the story is much bigger than one new SKU in Sony’s ever evolving lineup…
Camera tech, on the whole, has been on an upward trajectory of evolution in recent years, fueled largely by the advances in the Smartphone space that keeps putting ever-better glass right in people’s pockets on a daily basis. And that is where things get interesting… the entire “What is a Photo” moment is as much about “What are you taking a photo with” as just about anything else… not to mention what happens after the shutter is pressed and Google’s cloud gets a minute or two with your hard-earned frames…
This one takes same turns for sure, but honestly… did you show up here for anything less?
We’ve talked several times on this very show about how valuable it is for some things to be a little bit predictable… its comfy, it feels safe, you tend to have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get. So when a company like Apple, who has been following the same announcement cadence more-or-less since dinosaurs were figuring out how to search with Spotlight, sends out invites to a wholly virtual event, one week in advance, for 8pm Prime Time on a Monday night… well comfy and “the same” just flew right out the window!
Now don’t get me wrong, we had a pretty good idea this event was coming and what we’d be treated to… a new processor or two and maybe a one-more-thing… but in one of the tightest 30 minutes of modern tech we ran through a whole new family of processors, updated laptops and desktops powered by them, and a wholesale re-shuffling of Apple’s computing lineup as a result… I almost forgot to switch back to Monday Night Football when it was done…
With no more preamble necessary, let’s spend some time talking not just about the products themselves, but also about what’s likely happening behind the scenes, the “why” behind such a seemingly uncharacteristic change in Apple’s announcement style, and what the could very well mean for such events in the future…
Maybe it’s a bit of leftover Halloween sugar high, but let’s go…
It’s not always overly obvious, but more often than not we do put a certain amount of planning into our episode topics… they vary greatly from recent big Tech events and device drops that we just couldn’t wait to get our hands on and tell you about all the way to deeper, long term formats like our favorite “The Cost of” series… but on the other end of the spectrum are those born out of an experience we didn’t plan to share, but became to hard to resist.
This week is absolutely one of the latter, because following a pretty last-minute trip across the country I was struck by how much the tech that powers those trips has changed even just in recent years. The greatest hits are of course still there: A laptop, a smartphone, a game console... but the shape, size, and capability of these devices has leapt forward in a way that even surprised me when I slowed down long enough to think about it.
The connective tissue to so many of our other beloved topics was also too hard to resist… Is it safe to charge your phone at a public charging station or should I find a good old fashioned wall plug at the airport? The Public Wifi might seem faster, but my trusty hotspot and VPN are the combo for me. Is being able to connect with my office, team, and clients at a moments notice a miracle of technology or a curse of our remote culture? I could go on and on, and in many ways that’s exactly what we did.
So pour another cup of coffee, minimize that Priceline page, and let’s talk all the things about Travel Tech…
Hanging on the wall in the next room, in some cheap-ish frames that came from insert-big-box-store here, are a series of architectural photos of some of the great buildings around downtown Chicago… the edges are just a little pixelated if you look close enough, the colors are blown out in several places, and at best they follow the rule-of-almost-thirds… But I love them.
They’ve followed me through several apartments and houses through the years, and are typically one of the first things to go up because they’re a structural component of “home” to me. You see, these mediocre-at-best photos are mine.
They originate from a particularly important journey to Chicago with my then-girlfriend-turned-fiancé (on that very trip), and were the result of the most basic “point and shoot” photography with my now-infamous iPhone 4 of the day. Some time later my (by that point) wife printed, framed, and gifted me those photos from our trip. They mean the world to me.
If your wondering by this point why I’m filling air time with more-than-decade old photos from an ancient iPhone, its because that’s just how important these memorialized moments can be.
So when Nikon releases a camera that, in no uncertain terms, is focused on nostalgia, manual photo manipulation, and the build quality of a Sherman tank… the very train of thought I describe above is obviously still important to some people out there!
Today we’re going to talk about pictures, photos, why they’re not necessarily the same thing, and the first in a likely long-line of evolving conversation on the tools we use to capture them. Literally hours on the heels of cracking open the box, let’s get hands on with Nikon’s brand new ZF DSLR…
The concept of a “thing” being greater than the sum of its parts is one of those recurring topics on this show… mostly because it’s so true across the technology space. Gadgets, services, apps… you name it… sometimes the product that ends up in your hands is just… more that it otherwise should have been on paper…
This week we had the opportunity to get hands-on with Google’s recently announced Pixel 8 Pro… and the results were exactly that… the screen is better and brighter, the processor is faster and more efficient, and the Operating System has a fresh coat of paint and a slew of new features… All are fine, some are even good, but something else about this device is more than even all of that should add up to…
Google’s journey through hardware has been… storied… From the days of Nexus phones and Google Glass all the way to today’s Pixel lineup of phones, foldables, and tablets there has always been something missing. It’s not always about quality, direction, or usefulness… it just constantly feels like Google isn’t “all in” on these efforts. And in a very real way, there’s a Samsung-sized reason that could be true…
So with that in mind, maybe just maybe things are starting to shift… a stepped-up Ad campaign, a very real moment happening around all-things-AI, and a promise of years and years of guaranteed upgrades might push the math in Google’s favor this year… or this is going to turn out to be just another reminder from Google to Samsung that yes, they still exist as more than a software vendor of theirs…
Which is it going to be? Let’s find out…
This week on Solid State, things are definitely a little more… laid back. You see, every so often, you just believe with all of your heart that a company is going to surprise you… that everything won’t be exactly the way the leaks, predictions, and outright guesses said they would…
Other times though… well that’s just what happens and what-we-said-is-what-we-got!
With no more beating around the bush, Microsoft had an event to basically refresh some devices… we’d already seen… announce some services… we’d already used… and update us on their roadmap… while saying nothing at all.
I don’t want to cast stones at Microsoft specifically, they’re hardly alone in the who’s who of major companies that just couldn’t pull the “big show” together… but on the heels of massive layoffs earlier in the year and the sudden departure of one of its best, brightest, and most renowned… things just might not be business-as-usual in Redmond these days.
Now, that all hardly sounds like a good sales pitch for 45-or-so minutes of your listening attention, but don’t worry, it IS us after all! We dive deep on not just the “what” but the “WHY” with so much of Microsoft’s current moment.
And, to sweeten things up, we round out the episode with our first hands-on time with none other than the iPhone 15 Pro Max…
So toggle that Action Button, because it’s time to go full yin-and-yang and talk Microsoft’s 2023 Surface Event AND Apple’s iPhone 15 debut…
Let’s set the stage… you’re driving down the interstate (hmm… haven’t we been here before?)… and while attempting to make a pass in the left lane going a perfectly legal speed, you discover the source of all the slowness is a big semi truck, cruise set on 65, and emblazoned down the blue cargo bed in bold, white letters is “AMAZON”…
This is a familiar site to all of us because, well, it’s frankly how we get a lot of our stuff! For better or for worse, it’s a thing! So when Amazon shows up each fall with one of those semi trucks loaded down with nothing more than announcements for new products and services people tend to pay attention!
This year was, put simply, no different and yet entirely different at the same time… Words like “Echo”, “Fire”, and “for kids” abounded, but right under the surface was a new sort of tension… All things Echo suddenly also mean all-things-Generative AI, and the normal lineup of every possible screen size of device was pared down to just a couple of (relatively) minor refreshes and spec bumps.
This by itself isn’t necessary just an Amazon thing… we’ve talked very recently about how at first glance Apple’s own iPhone event was seemingly subdued, even calm. But Amazon is just in a different position… layoffs earlier in the year touched almost every division, including the ones responsible for these very devices. And while Echo is nearly ubiquitous across households, they partially accomplish that feat with bargain-basement prices and never-ending pack-ins…
So the question that remains, is this truly just a “slower year” for Amazon, or is there perhaps something more strategic happening just behind closed doors… Let’s find out…
Nostalgia is a thing we talk about on this show every so often… Okay… maybe a little more frequently than that but you get it…
So when September rolls around it’s hard not to start feeling like it’s iPhone Christmas Eve… an invite is going to go out (however cryptically), the journalistic would descends on Cupertino, and the next thing you know it there’s a new iPhone!
And then… well… you normally get to wait days (or longer) to preorder it… and then tragically you get to wait days (or longer) for it to arrive…
You’d be forgiven for wondering… what the heck is there to be nostalgic for here? It sounds like 4-6 weeks of pent-up consumer demand followed by a year-long cycle of equal parts loving and dissecting a piece of metal, glass, and silicon until it’s time to shell out and buy yet another one not too many months later…
But this is exactly why we do it… the iPhone has become one of those cornerstones… a more-or-less fixed place in time and space, a point of origin for the technology cycle to revolve around. Yes, there are many other events from countless other brands, but few carry such a broad impact on the consumer attention span…
It’s not just tech journalists and gadget nerds that know it’s iPhone week… everyone knows it… and that creates a moment that’s actually special, dare I say a little magical, and (in the end) one I become nostalgic for when it’s come-and-gone…
So, back to the matter at hand, the big day has come and now it’s time to dive all the way in on Apple's “Wanderlust” iPhone event 2023…
In our last episode we led off with gadget season being “upon us”… and we weren’t wrong. Samsung came out early with their fall lineup of devices and, if you couldn’t tell, we think they’re pretty great!
But if Samsung snuck out “first”, it wasn’t for lack of the industry-at-large being right on their heels…
In just a few short days, virtually every technology brand you’ve heard of in the last decade will be taking to the stage, peddling their latest wares, and trying oh-so-desperately to make the case for why their device, service, or flying car is the most important purchase you could hope to make this holiday season…
We came into this expecting to be brief, to do a purely 50,000 ft overview of what’s ahead and then let the events (and products) speak for themselves… but seriously, have you not learned anything yet by listening to this show?
It’s a brisk pace nonetheless, with five major events (and countless others in the periphery) happening just in the next five weeks… Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google all have major, flagship-level announcements in store…
With that in mind then, the real question on everyones mind is which of them will be worth your time, which of them will actually move the needle in their respective space, and… honestly… which of them will actually be any good?
A month’s worth of caffeine is already flowing, so let's dive right in to see just what Big Tech has in the pipeline as we kickoff Gadget Season 2023….
Gadget season is upon us and that just makes me… happy…
We do this job for a whole lot of reasons, but one of them is the genuine love of an unopened box, fresh protective film on the screen, and a quiet evening of installing Day 1 updates, apps, and syncing data…
Sadly I’m not being the slightest bit sarcastic here! So when Samsung had their foldable-watch-tablet-car-washing machine Unpacked event a few weeks ago, I knew that several such nights of new-device-goodness was in my future…
Now that we’ve had a few short days of being hands-on with them though, we couldn’t help but hop back on the mics and take a first-impressions walk through what’s changed this year and, possibly just as importantly, what hasn't changed…
You’d be forgiven for seeing the vast majority of these releases as strictly iterative because… well… that’s exactly what they are…
But beneath the surface, and in a few cases right on it, there are some intentional and dare-I-say meaningful developments that may entice some to trade-in-and-trade-up or even be the final missing piece to attract a first time user…
Okay… lets dive in…
Technology is really supposed to do a lot of things… make us more efficient, remind us to be healthier, solve our most complex problems… while at the same time being simple enough that an elementary school child can pick it up and somehow make me feel a million years old at Fortnite…
All these things, whether they’re successful or not carry some measure of tangible value because, frankly, we would have stopped using them by now without it!
But in one, genuinely key area technology hasn’t just evolved in recent years, its hit light speed… and that’s the gear, the software, and really the services that drive and enable remote work in the modern world…
Listen, regardless of what any of these companies will happily tell you, none of this is revolutionary… we’ve had VPNs for decades, video calls since Skype, and sometimes I actually do miss when email was the only virtual pile of notifications I had to worry about triaging each day… but the ubiquity of it all, how the rabid hunger for these tools in almost every vertical and way of life… that's relatively new…
Certainly the Pandemic played a horrifying but pivotal role in that seemingly overnight explosion onto the stage of our “new normal”… but as companies globally are grappling with the NEW new normal… we got to wondering at a personal level, and a professional level, heck even as a human that just wants to get to work each day… what is the Cost of Working Remotely…
Let’s just get it out of the way… I tend to change phones… shall we say… about as often as most people get their hair cut…
So when I get to say my SIM card that is all but exclusively held for my “phone of the month” problem has been attached to the Samsung Galaxy Flip 4 that I literally purchased on this show last year… well honestly it might be a record!
The phone isn’t slow but it isn’t necessarily “fast” either… the build quality has every short coming that a modern foldable phone has and then some… and even when unfolded it’s still noticeably smaller than the iPhone that rides shotgun in my other pocket.
So, why then, has this phone stood my version of a “test of time” where countless others have gotten their 30-or-so days of trial by combat followed by relegation to the dreaded desk drawer of waiting until something else comes along that it can be traded-in towards…
The best answer I can come up with… and stay with me here… is that the Flip is actually different… it’s actually novel… dare I say every so often it’s… FUN!
If you haven’t pieced it together yet (or read the episode title) I am, in the usual round-about way, building up to Samsung’s foldable Unpacked event for 2023… No the Flip 5 wasn’t the only announcement, in fact there were several and each had their own unique way of standing out in sometimes-subtle but always meaningful ways…
We’re going to do our best to hit them all, give a Birds Eye view of what’s coming in a couple short weeks when these devices hit store shelves, and set the stage for what MIGHT just be one heck-of-a “What’s in the box” episode to come…
Anyone who knows me personally is aware of a few things… I love my gadgets, I tend to talk too much, and I drop things… a lot
I wouldn’t say I’m clumsy by nature, per se, I just only have one speed and that speed usually lends itself to very costly slabs of metal and glass being turned into temporary frisbees until gravity steps in and does what it does best…
Now, based on the number of quarter-inch thick cases I see on virtually every piece of consumer electronics “out in the wild” I get the impression I’m not alone. You get out of the car, and your phone takes a tumble. You plug in your laptop and that’s when the dog runs by and you really wish you had MagSafe. Or… not saying this has happened to me… but you’re 100% sure that shelf can support a TV because you definitely remembered the drywall anchors, right?
So what does all of this mayhem and potential destruction add up to? Devices that at best have some bumps and bruises from the journey, but often enough things do just break. And with the ever-growing importance they have in our daily lives, when they do break we want to fix them!
The question coming more and more into focus both in the industry and frankly beyond is this then… when it comes time to fix it, who should be able to do it, how much should it cost, and (sadly) should it even be possible? Set down that screwdriver, secure your OtterBox Defender, and lets talk through what’s next for the Right to Repair…
A lot can change in year… I mean heck, a lot can change in a minute… but in this case we’ll settle with the last twelve months or so…
Thinking back to early 2022, a certain illness was still commonly in the news, shipping containers were piled up at ports across the globe, and seemingly precious little of what was in those containers was making it to store shelves…
The impact of the supply chain on consumer goods had a stark impact that is surely still being felt now, but is it getting any better?
We’re not even about to try and answer that question on a truly macro-economic scale, because if we did we’d have you all 3D printing your own car parts and hydroponically growing corn with AI by the end of the episode… but in the case of something we are at least a little more qualified to speak to, we chose to zoom in on all-things-tech… specifically our favorite pass time of PC building…
So with delivery trucks back on the road, the crypto-driven demand bubble bursting around the GPU industry, and just a little too much time on our hands these days… we’ll take a shot at answering what is the thing about building a PC in 2023…
The technology field, like any other business sector, is made up of… well… businesses…
Those businesses have their own brands, and they fight tooth-and-nail to protect them. Be it through Trademark, Copyright, or the ever-present threat of being turned into a verb… these brands are as valuable as the literal products and services they represent.
But what happens… what it all goes wrong. When the lights finally go out, the doors are shut, and there’s no more business left to promote. Where, then, do brands go to die?
Today we’re going to talk about a mere handful examples of former behemoths, hockey-stick startups, and even dot-com-bubble flashes in the pan that all have one very important thing in common… they don’t exist any more.
Some fell to our good friend competition, others to poor or misguided leadership, and a couple, well… just weren’t good ideas in the first place…
Business, like life, has a lifecycle. A beginning and an end. Not only is it expected, it’s natural.
So as we peruse the museum of logos that once adorned shelves both virtual and physical a few short years ago, we can’t help but wonder… who’s next?
At first glance, the setting here in my office is much like any other morning…
From the vantage point of my desk chair, I’m surrounded on all sides by various monitors, valued momentos, and a lone window to an outside world I admittedly spend too little time in…
What makes today different from most, though, is no matter where I look there is a floating display just above and to the right of my eye line… showing me the time, temperature, and ever growing number of unread emails I need to get to…
See, I happen to be wearing the first attempt at an Augmented Reality future by a multi-billion dollar behemoth of tech launch to international fanfare at their annual Developers Conference… it captured the headlines coast-to-coast and the imaginations of tech nerds and every-day-people alike…
Now… before you get TOO excited… no, I’m not wearing Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro… in fact this device predates it by over a decade…
Google’s Glass might rank amongst the best examples of a technology that was just too far ahead of its time… Battery technology, Display capability, or the supporting smart devices themselves just weren’t “there yet” to create the critical mass needed for a consumer market success, or even the Enterprise-focused pivot they woefully attempted at the ninth hour…
So in today’s episode, we’re here to talk about what’s next for Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality by starting where (for many) it all began… and trying to figure out if Apple’s doomed to a growing list of false-starts or are they indeed on to something… Different…
One of the best parts about doing this show for over a year now is, every so often, we get to take a look back… to size things up in the past with a lense of the present…
When we covered Apples World Wide Developer Conference in 2022, it’s impossible to ignore that things just seemed… different
Maybe it was the Cupertino Spaceship still shaking off the Pandemic blues… or simply the year was a mid-way stop towards plans that just hadn’t “gotten there” yet… regardless the cause, we spent over an hour talking future offerings, hypotheticals, and maybe even a piece of two of vaporware...
But if that was the tone of WWDC 2022, then 2023 can only be described as “come and get it!”
The most-loved laptop in the world gains a bigger screen and a more aggressive price… that you can buy next week…
Some of the most powerful desktops in their class picked up new processors and new bounds of expandability… that you can pre-order right now…
And every platform from iOS to your Apple Watch learned new tricks that you can try for yourself in Public Beta form as soon as next month…
All that, and team-Apple wasn’t quite done yet… because even after two hours plus of break-neck announcements and infomercial goodness…
We still had time for One More Thing…
It’s certainly not unique to tech or gadgets… but I hear people say all the time “we’re not allowed to have favorites”…
Well, I hate to break it to you, but we all do… myself included. And when it comes to video game consoles, my favorite has been the same for a very long time. We’ve walked together down the path of the great history of Consoles over the last few months, and this week we’re book-ending it with a “last but certainly not least moment”… albeit one that comes at a very big and potentially course-altering time for the company and brand we’re covering today…
You see, when a little Redmond-based software company (and yes, I’m kidding) decided over twenty years ago to throw caution to the wind and not only enter the hardware space but to do so against the likes of Nintendo and Sony a lot of people said they were crazy, it would be short lived, and possibly even disastrous for them…
Fast forward those twenty-or-so years and Microsoft’s Xbox sit’s firmly alongside Sony and Nintendo at the forefront of the gaming world… but as we mentioned earlier… that world is changing at a breakneck pace…
Rampant consolidation, massive hardware shortages, and skyrocketing costs are just a few of the hurdles not just ahead and upon Microsoft and their peers this very moment…
So the question remains, will Microsoft find a health pack quickly enough to jump to the next level, or have their aspirations taken them to the ultimate boss battle under-equipped and woefully outmatched?
Let’s find out…
Collaboration is important… like really important. At our infamous “day job” its even one of our core values… without it what we do every day, plainly, wouldn’t be possible…
So, when something is that important… is there a “wrong” way to do it?
What happens when a team that used to share four walls and a roof suddenly find themselves spread across a city if not a continent? What used to be a simple knock on the door is now a seemingly ever-more-complex mind reading trick of finding the right moment to disrupt a co-worker without completely destroying their work flow…
You see, in short, even something so basic and so foundationally important can be done wrong… it does come at a cost… especially in the remote-heavy world we now find ourselves in…
Basic social queues can evaporate into the mist of a Slack channel, and what used to be simple team-building by exposure now requires an intentional formula of prompts, nudges, and sometimes outright forced interaction…
In this post-pandemic society then, how can we best use this magical technology to bridge the gap and strengthen bonds while being a globe apart… what is the Cost of Collaboration?
Let’s just come right out and admit it… it’s been a weird few years in tech…
Pandemic-driven development cycles, evaporating supply chains, ever-moving targets around remote work… even the industry-wide layoffs of the last few months… It’s been a bumpy ride.
But the more things feel like they go off the rails, the more reassuring it is when something familiar, something “expected” occurs…
The COVID years saw our favorite moments in tech move to glorified infomercials, and with that went some of the magic of a live, on-stage announcement. But just as the world as a whole has been on a slow, steady march back to “the before times”, tech events have been returning to good-old-fashioned demos, glitches, and highly questionable event wifi…
Google I/O this year wasn’t its first back in the Amphitheater, but it sure felt like the first one where Google was “back” with a lineup of announcements across its verticals… hardware, services, emerging categories like AI… this one has it all.
Now, it obviously remains to be seen how many of these announcements translate into products that consumers actual use or, frankly, ever see a physical or virtual store shelf… But on the whole, while faced with a rapidly evolving frontier of AI and the looming specter of Antitrust, Google came out swinging, and if nothing else that just felt right
Pour a drink (because, like the event itself, this is a long one), and let’s see where Google I/O intends to take us one Bard query at a time…
I’m probably about to date myself a little bit… but amongst my fondest early tech memories was shopping for my first computer. No, not the first computer I built or even the first computer in my house, but this one was going to be mine…
While standing in the “computer aisle” at a now-failed big box store, I vividly remember two things… the leap of faith it took to pony-up for a Pentium II processor when I knew full well the Pentium III was going to magically drop the day after the largest purchase of my life, and the advice the sales person gave me that has stuck with me to this day…
See, he saw me pouring over the specs of every single off-white tower they had, considering the RAM, clock speed, port selection, you name it. What he didn't see me do was pay any attention at all to the next aisle over, where they kept the monitors…
He kindly struck up a conversation (mostly because they’d seen me repeat this pattern every Friday after school for at least a month), and the advice he shared amounted to “don’t blow your whole budget on the PC itself… remember all the graphics in the world are useless if you don’t have anything to watch them on…”
From that one interaction, my near-obsession with resolution, refresh rates, and yes, brightness was born. I didn’t just want my programs to load as fast as possible, or my storage to be larger than I could ever use (and that’s never happened), I wanted to see the digital worlds in front of me come alive.
Fast forward a "couple" decades and that equation has found its way into everything… TVs, smart phones, tablets, and yes… my trusty monitor. Now, let me bump up the brightness a bit and let’s talk some pixels…
We’ve said it many, many times here on Solid State… some things are just supposed to… work…
Chief among them are basic functions like lighting, heating & cooling, or kitchen timers…
So who would have guessed that here in 2023, we’re knee-deep in yet another format war that has drawn battle lines around none other than your light switch? Okay… that’s over-simplifying even for us… but you have to admit it’s not far off!
Bulbs, switches, plugs, cameras… toasters… you name it! They’re all joining the “smart home revolution” and aim to bring the most modern of conveniences to the most antiquated of creature comforts… as long as you buy the “right one”.
The biggest problem is the “right one” for you varies heavily for you, for me, or your next door neighbor you still haven’t managed to talk to… The space is growing by the minute with new brands, platforms, and approaches and most importantly this is a good thing if the devices can actually communicate with each other…
A lot to ask for, I know, but this week we’re going to take stock of what’s running in our very own homes and ask the question Parts Bin style… What does Matter for your Smart Home?
It’s kind of funny to me how many people end up in their career because of a childhood love or hobby…
You have the architect that couldn’t get enough Legos, the mechanic that collected way too many matchbox cars, or even the artist sees a star-filled sky and grabs brushes instead of a telescope…
These things become such massive parts of who we are, often at such young and formative ages… they become us…
Well, if that’s the case, and you’ve been listening to this show for any amount of time, then it’s not hard to connect the dots that for your three Solid State presenters one of those early loves was games… and in the case of today’s episode specifically the hardware we used to play them.
We’re going to take a step back and walk through decades of truly foundational gaming history that started with a alliance that should have changed the landscape… and instead created a fierce rivalry that lives on to this day…
So sit back, log in, and let’s talk Playstation, a History…
Competition is one of those things that, whether you like it or not, makes sense right?
If I make bicycles and you start making a better kind of bicycle, my choices are pretty straightforward: start making a better bicycle, start making a cheaper bicycle, or sooner-or-later stop making bicycles…
Okay, I know I’ve vastly over-simplifying what can feel like very complex games of market share, dominant messaging, outright morals & ethics… but at its minimum and most basic, we’ve long held on this show that competition is a good thing, especially in the world of technology…
So, as we navigate a world of mass consolidation, roll-up strategies, and the outright stifling of startups in virtually any space… it was well past time to ask ourselves the question, what is the long-term cost of only three meaningful cell phone carries, of two dominant smartphone platforms, of one ring to rule them all… Eh yeah I let that one get away from me, but you get the idea…
In all seriousness, though, was IS the cost… of no competition…
Some pieces of technology eventually reach the point of truly becoming ubiquitous… a computer on every desk, a smart phone in every pocket, a drone in every backpack…
Okay, maybe that last one is just me, but you get what I mean…
What we all probably can agree on, though, is one of the first gadgets to reach this critical mass of scale is everyone’s favorite big-screen rectangle, the television…
What used to be a stand-out possession of one or two households per neighborhood has now become the centerpiece of several rooms in any given house. But the thing about these screens is, they’re not all that useful without anything to actually put on that screen…
Going back through the decades, one of the earliest answers to that problem is by sending content to the viewer over the literal airwaves… one set of silver, telescoping “bunny ears” later and suddenly Johnny Carson was right there in your own living room.
As with any technology, though, evolutions must continue… those telescoping bunny ears may have long-since been replaced by a more modern antenna, and the black-and-white static we all knew and hated has been upgraded to high definition goodness.
With additions like HDR quality, true data delivery, and on-the-move access… the next chapter in Over-the-Air TV sounds like a solid upgrade, but as with anything else what are the hidden costs?
Let’s tune in and find out…
It’s really frustrating when something breaks… this is true of everything from a garage door not opening to a lightbulb burning out… we just want things to work. It seems, though, this is somehow doubly frustrating when what fails is our tech.
The printer runs out of ink when you need to print a boarding pass, your phone freezes up completely after a bad update, or the Roomba gets stuck on the same rug no matter how many times you tell it not to try and go there…
Yeah, we’ve all been there, and it sucks. But for all the times the technology seems to fail us, recently we started talking about all the times we the human fail the technology. Was the printer blinking a “low ink” light for weeks before it finally ran out? How many other updates did we knowingly skip before this one bricked the phone? And now that I think about it, did I actually update the Roomba’s cleaning map or did I just yell at the robot expecting it to know what I want?
All of those examples are frustrating for sure, but thankfully none are what I would call “dangerous”. When it comes to our data, privacy, and digital wellbeing though that story can change in an instant. See for all the firewalls, Multi-factor Authentication, and advanced security software we put up in the name of “staying safe”… all of that goes out the window the moment we fill out a bogus survey or hand over critical access information to “Jeff from the IT department”…
So once again, let’s take a minute, “slow down to speed up” and talk through all the ways we can help stop attackers from Hacking the Human…
In just about any product category, ideally you should have options… entry level, mid-range, consumer, pro-sumer, the list is nearly endless…
But every so often, you have an entry into the space the is so outlandish, so devil-may-care over the top that most people see it and wonder who in the world would ever buy it for, frankly, what’s usually an equally over the top price tag.
Yeah, the topic of this week’s episode firmly falls in line with this theory… compared to virtually every competitor in its space its larger, thicker, heavier, hotter, pricier… just… "more"… than anything we’ve tested before.
When all of that crazy comes together in a single package though something… unexpected happens. The brightness and fidelity of the display makes you almost forget the back crushing weight. The ever-rising warmth under the keyboard deck isn’t as uncomfortable when Ultra High graphics settings in your latest games don’t even making it flinch.
Suddenly, what was so unexpected, may have become special…
Okay, so clear off some space on your desk (because you won't be wanting to run this on your lap) and let’s take a long hard look at Razer’s latest flagship, the Blade 16…
You say the word “Blockbuster” and for most people it conjures the image of blue and yellow signage, cardboard stand-ups, and the never-ending question of what do we watch this weekend…
The thing was, all the movies in that store had likely already had their spotlight-moment on “the big screen” in move theaters across the country and the globe. With any luck, their creators and producers had long-since already made their money back and then some, so every rental and sale of the movie afterwards went straight to the bottom line.
Fast forward to the streaming era and really that narrative didn’t change much right away… major films would hit the local 20-screen monstrosity and then weeks or months later would find their way to a streaming service of choice to collect fractional pennies from your $14.99 per month.
Today though, that tide has turned dramatically the other direction…
Major productions are hitting streaming services “day of” more and more frequently, and even those that don’t are still finding a viewing public perfectly willing to wait it out for the benefit of watching from the comfort of their own home.
You still have standouts that will draw a crowd and, most importantly, drive up popcorn sales… but is that enough? The other meaning of blockbuster was the summer tentpoles that literally made the year for studios, producers, and outlets alike. Is there enough steam left to keep that engine plowing forward, or has the Streaming World really, perhaps permanently, changed our movie-going experience?
Let’s tune in and find out…
Picture something with me…
You’re on a long road trip, sitting in the back seat of the car fully engrossed in the screen in front of you… headphones in, buttons being mashed, absolutely sure you’re just one more push away from beating your all-time record…
The miles and hours go by, but none of that matters because the world around you begins and ends with the pixels in front of your face. You’re lost in the game, and the experience.
The funny part is, most of us today would complete that picture with the screen in question being your smartphone of choice, burning hours in the latest game you downloaded from someone’s app store. But in fact, this story took place decades ago in the back of a 1993 Buick rolling down the Interstate between Pennsylvania and Florida.
The device: a Nintendo Gameboy. The game: Super Mario Land. The batteries: Double-A and someone always dead or dying…
That exact story is forever part of my personal gaming (and technology) past, and it's ones like it that I’ll remember fondly for life. Nintendo made it possible at a time when other such experiences took place tethered to a TV in the Living Room that had better be turned off by bed time.
So this week, we’re going to give Nintendo their well-earned moment in the spotlight to talk through their distant beginnings, pivotal contributions to our present, and likely undeniable role in the future.
Found some more batteries, so lets play…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, there’s really no need for a big extended intro because, well, everyone already knows what we’re here to talk about!
Yep, exactly as announced Samsung called the tech world together last week to show off their top-of-2023 wares in the flagship smartphone and laptop space…
The mere fact that this event was finally in-person again might really be the single biggest bit of news… on the smartphone front at least. Cameras were upgraded, processors got snappier, and edges got “boxier”…
This is hardly just a Samsung problem, but this space is hitting an all-new stage of maturity that almost lends itself to seem even more yawn-worthy when showcased in big, overdone events versus the infomercial style announcement of the high-Pandemic years.
But even so, Samsung still brought the flair, the leaks, and shockingly three laptops one of which may just have stolen the show if it’s battery can stand the test of real world use.
Okay, I wouldn’t exactly call that a short intro after all, but lets dive right in anyway and talk our way through Samsung’s Unpacked 2023 event…
Grocery shopping might be one of the last great bastions of a one-to-one exchange of money for goods… I stand in the check-out line, my items are scanned, and I hand over entirely too much money for a dozen eggs before leaving the store with my bag of soon-to-be-dinners. Thankfully, for now at least, there are no monthly recurring costs associated with my four-pack of Orange Celsius…
What I’m trying to get at is, for the most part, I know the cost of that bag of groceries the moment I leave the store.
Enter in the question, what is the real cost of so many other things in our lives? You’ve got raw dollars, up-front, post-sale, social, personal, mental… the list is exhausting!
This isn’t one we’re going to entirely crack here today, or frankly any time soon… but for starters we’re going to spend some time interrogating the questions around our connected lives: Social Media, Cellular Data, the “ding” heard round the room every time someone leaves their ringer on…
So today, let’s talk the TRUE Cost of Connectivity…
When you follow just about any industry long enough, things can get a bit… cyclical…
Tech is no different there, and possibly one of the leading offenders: CES happens every January, Samsung shows ever-larger phones early each year and folding-ones later that year, and the next thing we know it’s time for another Black Friday “sales” spectacular…
But, every so often… any one of these brands are poised to throw out a curve ball, and this week Apple pulled exactly that...
In a relative one-two-punch of announcements, we went from a perfectly normal post-CES kind of week to new entries in the laptop, desktop, and Smart Home space straight to your ears from the Cupertino space ship…
Once we recovered from our shock, watched a couple of infomercials, and poured over entirely too many spec sheets, we decided the only thing left to do was dissect each announcement for your listening “pleasure”… and see if we can whittle down to what really has been announced, is it any good, and most importantly… should you buy any of it?
Sit back, load up your favorite benchmark tool, and lets talk our way through Apple’s surprise M2 Mac and HomePod announcements…
This shows mere existence is evidence to the fact that when you get two or more tech enthusiasts together… craziness ensues…
What happens, then, when you get over 100,000 tech enthusiasts, journalists, marketers, and visionaries together in the middle of the desert for a week and surround them with a year’s worth of development, innovation, and just-plain-hard-work? Yeah… craziness doesn’t even start to describe it…
This sand and booze-fueled masterpiece is none of than CES… the annual top-of-year kickoff to everything from TVs, to smart homes, dancing robots...
2023 was absolutely no different, with a number of standouts we’re here to talk through today, a few of which might even see a store shelf someday…
So full-blow Solid State style let’s grab an energy drink, charge those batteries, and full-on sprint through just a handful of our favorites from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show…
It’s funny to me how “famous last words” are very rarely the actual “last words” on any subject… today’s episode is absolutely no different…
In an episode just a few months ago we took a deep-dive on the still growing resurgence of all-things-vinyl, and yours truly uttered the fateful words that, at the very least, we’d never have to circle back on the subject to cover other now-defunct formats like, for example, cassette tapes…
Fast forward to today’s episode and we’re here to do exactly that… peruse the digital merch table on the ongoing resurgence of everyone’s “favorite” once-ultra-portable medium…
Grab your #2 pencil, rewind those reels, and let’s talk cassettes, why we loved them, and are they really worth our love once once again?
Storage space is one of those funny things you rarely think about until you run out of it… this is true if you’re talking about the spice shelf of your pantry or the “free” 15GB that comes with your Gmail account… But when it’s full, your options are clean out what you don’t need or expand capacity.
Across every gadget we own, every account we maintain, and every press of the shudder button on your camera… one universal truth is we’re adding to that digital storage footprint every second of ever day. And as the technology evolves, every image file becomes bigger and seemingly every AAA title fills your Xbox hard drive that much faster…
Today we’re pulling forward a topic we actually recorded a while back (so, as usual, forgive our earlier audio quality sins) but felt here and now as everyone prepares to unbox shiny new phones and install countless DLC packs, was just the right time to talk all things digital storage.
Now excuse me while I go figure out how to add another shelf to our spice rack…
Some brands are just… known. People play Ping Pong, not table tennis and I simply have never heard someone say “have you tried Bing’ing it yet” on purpose… Sometimes the name simply becomes synonymous with the category…
Amazon is amongst the largest names not just in Tech but in business full-stop… and one of the many products that got them there is a simple slab of plastic with a black-and-white display and a name that is indeed synonymous with the category.
Let’s face it, you see someone reading a book on the subway and there’s not folded paper in their hands, they’re probably using a Kindle…
The development of the Kindle product line has been one of slow, steady iteration on a few key themes: Provide an easy-on-the eyes display attached to a seemingly endless battery and get them in people’s hands as cheaply as possible.
This year though, something new arrived… with a sizably larger display, non-symmetrical stance, and a pen floating to one side, today we’re taking a good look at Amazon’s newest entry, the Kindle Scribe…
Last week we talked about what Black Friday has become for tech, gadgets, and everything else we love around here… a marketing stunt
But, as we touched on, that doesn’t necessarily means deals don’t exist you just have to do your homework on what you’re buying and, sometimes even more importantly, who you’re buying it from…
In follow-up to that idea, we're diving back in "Parts Bin style" to sprint through several of the latest and greatest products to hit this gadget season and where they fall in the equation of must-buy game changer versus overpriced re-hash…
So, in the wrap-up to this year’s coverage of the holiday shopping season for all-things-tech, let’s check out the gear that should be in everyone’s virtual shopping cart and the ones best left collecting dust… at least until it goes on sale next year…
There’s no preamble to the fact that it’s Thanksgiving week in the United States, and while for many this conjures images of Turkey, stuffing, and post-dinner naps on the couch, for a huge number of us it also means that just a few short hours after that nap begins standing in endless lines for "Black Friday", one of the most important shopping days of the year…
Or… is it? The above would have been debatable over the last couple of years, and almost a certainty 5 or more years before then… But here, in 2022, is Black Friday actually a fixed day or has it actually become so much more that it’s lost any tangible meaning?
As with so many things, especially in tech, the answer likely lies somewhere in between. It’s impossible to argue that Black Friday exists as a “thing”, even as a brand unto itself… just ask the emails that have been steadily filling my Inbox since mid-July. But as a singular event where the mother-of-all-deals is likely to be found, we’re just not so sure…
In true Solid State fashion, lets take a verbal stroll through Black Friday as it was, as we feel it is today, and where it might be headed in the future…
The Fall months, for many people, are synonymous with new gadgets to play with… whether it’s the TV you’ve been waiting to go on sale, or the excuse you needed to splurge on that perfect mechanical keyboard… the options are endless and the promise of a new toy being just over the horizon is fun!
But every so often, especially for your three (somewhat) lovable presenters, things just go a bit sideways…
The next revolutionary widget turns out to be a dud, months or even years of pouring over rumors and reviews still leads you down a path to transistor-based disappointment… We’ve all been there…
So as we ramp up for a holiday season full of blowout sales, new device launches, and ever-rising hopes & dreams, we take a look back this week on some of the times those dreams just didn’t pan out…
If you happen to have watched the news, live in Florida, or listen to this show… you probably heard we had a hurricane…
Not just any hurricane though, Ian will likely continue to change record books for years to come… and while that experience has also changed lives, businesses, and the literal face of our homes… lessons also abound from these situations. What to do differently, how to prepare, can we be better?
Many of those lessons, especially for the crew here, had to do with our technology. What worked as intended? Did anything underperform or just not get the job done? Or, more hopefully, what were the game changers that may have even saved lives?
These are the questions we have been asking of ourselves for weeks now, and as a team decided the only thing worse than not asking them would be not telling people the answers… because if, buried in those details, is the one thing that saves someone the next go around… well that’s just why we do this…
If being gadget and “tech” people describes who we are on this show (and let’s face it, it does)… then at the core of that identity is a common thread that runs all the way back to the beginning, even to childhood, for each of us.
It led us to build our first PC, edit those first lines of code, and break FAR more things than we ever fixed on the road to somehow turning this passion for ones-and-zeroes into a life-long career.
Yep, that common thread is gaming… it influences the gear we buy, the way we will many hours of downtime, and too much of the stuff littering my shelves, walls, and library.
You’ll notice a dip in audio quality compared to other recent episodes, and that’s because we frankly recorded this months ago but decided the time needed to be right to release stores like these so near and dear to our hearts. So with the Holiday game release season in full-swing, what better time to step back and think fondly on our early titles, quests, and energy-drink-fueled weekends that led as all the way to where we are today…
Game on, Solid State.
It’s a pretty common topic in technology-circles these days to “what is a photo”…
With AI, computational photography, and just outright opinions being expressed creatively at the device level, the answer to that question has never been more up for grabs…
But in this week’s episode, we’re getting way down beneath that question to the types of photos take far less often than the ones you’re endlessly scrolling past on Instagram…
Yep, I’m talking about photos taken on an actual, purpose-built, Camera…
No, not the camera on your smartphone or the app on your Lock Screen, but the dusty hunk of metal, glass, and plastic taking up space on your shelf assuming you’ve even owned one in the last decade..
So, in true Solid Station fashion, we set out to get hands-on with a couple rather exceptional examples of these f-stop laden gadgets to see what we might all be missing out on by relying too heavily on the camera you always have with you versus the one you should have brought all along…
If you haven’t figured it out yet, this show is about tech… more specifically the tech we love and the tech we don’t-so-much “get”…
It’s not that we don’t understand the literal mechanics of it all, we’ve spent far too many sleepless nights ripping this stuff apart and kinda-sorta putting it back together again…
In those situations is the narrative around the tech and, more than likely, those selling it that has us at a loss…
This week Apple refreshed some literal tentpoles of their product set… both ends of the iPad spectrum that make up the overwhelming majority of the global tablet market, and the AppleTV hardware that is supposed to be the physical manifestation of their media-based aspirations….
So when products such as these are dropped with about as much fanfare as a new Blizzard flavor at Dairy Queen, that tends to get our attention. The question remains though, was there really nothing exciting to say, or is there an even more interesting story to be had in what wasn't…
Let’s find out…
The thing about disasters, “natural” ones at least, is that more often than not you really don’t see them coming… an alarm may give you the edge of a few minutes lead, or surrounding conditions may create the gut feeling of “something’s not right”… but in the case of a hurricane, usually they’re a little too big to miss…
The setup for this week’s episode is exactly one of those situations… Hurricane Ian is swirling around quite literally as I speak, and when it turned our way several days ago we decided it was an opportunity to take a long, hard look at how technology has developed around exactly these types of impending disasters…
Solar “generators”, cloud-based backups, and this thing called “Business Continuity” as a whole are all on tap, but the underlying message we hope comes through it all is, no matter what’s going on be safe, be prepared, and at the end of the day just try to be a good human…
And on that early bombshell, I’m going to go tighten my storm shutters and charge this laptop…
The other night, while preparing for this episode, I happened across one of those movies that, any time it’s on I have no choice but to watch the rest of it. We all have “those movies”, right?
In this case, the movie in question was Apollo 13… After all, it has everything… drama, heroism, and rooms full of fellow nerds doing what they do best…
I happened to tune-in just in time for the scene where the crew of the so-far-undamaged Apollo 13 were broadcasting mid-mission back to Earth… only to have their families discover the major TV networks hadn’t even picked up the live broadcast…
You see, at this point in the story, Apollo 13’s mission had allegedly become, dare-they-say, “business as usual”…
In a very different set of stakes, some parallels can be drawn to this week’s show… seemingly every year around this time, a California-based gadget creator calls upon press, influencers, and loyal followers to see the latest metal and glass slab to adorn the pocks of countless millions in just a few weeks time…
It represents the now-annual cycle of a production, logistics, and sales undertaking never before seen on on this planet… trillions of components, thousands of workers, and a globe encircled in deliveries. But for many, might we say it’s become “business as usual”?
You’ve no doubt guessed, we’re talking about Apple’s fall “Far Out” iPhone announcement event… where we were treated to a sort-of-new watch, a really new watch, and a phone with some dynamic takes on a few well-known ideas…
Underneath the sheen of “we’ve been here before” though, something just a little bit different is in the air…
Sometimes… you just have a false start. For us here at Solid State, a false start looks like an episode starting with aggressively mediocre audio quality because one host forgets to hit the record button on the main feed…
But when you’re a multi-Billion dollar international technology brand, a false start looks a bit different…
More along the line of thousands of devices recalled, millions spent in re-engineering, and a brand supposedly left in tatters…
The thing is though, when the brand you’re talking about is SAMSUNG, they are both experienced and accomplished at rising to that challenge.
With the storied launch of the original Galaxy Fold in 2019, that should have been where the story both began and ended. But here we are just three years later with the newly minted Galaxy Z Fold and Flip 4…
Is this even a comeback anymore or are we actually approaching a power-move for dominance? Let’s go hands-on and find out what’s in the box....
On this show, it’s become something of a recurring theme that “gadgets” are so much bigger than just your smartphone or laptop…
In past episodes we’ve covered the tech around everything from headphones to vinyl records, and this week we keep that theme up with the true and honest gadget-tech around modern day cameras and broader photography…
It’s one to really take in if the genuine art behind the scene is of interest to you, and even if not I have to at least suggest listening very closely in the last 10-15 minutes… because you might just hear the sound of Eric and I buying the same camera “live” on-show with no pre planning and less than no permission…
Why do I feel like we’re starting a bit of a trend here…
Often enough when it comes to consumer electronics, the equation is pretty simple… when the “next generation” comes out it should be better, faster, stronger and probably a little more expensive. But, we tell ourselves credit-card-in-hand, it’s worth it for the “new one”, right?
All kidding aside, that very rough math normally holds up whether it’s the latest phone, the biggest new TV, or the shiniest smart watch. With this year’s much-anticipated MacBook Air refresh, though, things just don’t feel that “cut and dry”, with it’s predecessor hanging out on the Store page right alongside with an often-discounted price tag to boot.
This week, we’re hands-on with Apple’s newly minted M2 MacBook Air and dive through all of its updates, upgrades, and occasionally controversial features.
And in the end, that simple equation from earlier is met with an equally age-old question… is it worth it?
The history of technology and gadget culture is one of debates and ideologies… “VHS or Betamax”… “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC”… “Red vs. Blue”…
Today, though, no such standoff may be more present or far-reaching than that of iOS versus its age-old nemesis… Android…
But just saying something “runs Android” is kind of like saying a car “has an engine”… there are countless shapes, sizes, and takes on features that in a lot of ways vary based on the badge on the back of the device.
So this week let’s take a look at what can only be described as the “many faces of Android”, and see which might suit you best?
On this show, nothing is ever quite good enough… we can’t help ourselves! Battery life can always be longer, load times can definitely be shorter, and in the case of this week’s episode the clear, crisp audio can always be refined just that little bit more…
Audio tech is every bit as much a “gadget” as your Xbox or Surface Pro, and really transcends so much of our gear because, at the end of the day, what good is a 4K Ultra-HD Blu-Ray if you can barely hear the action on screen?
It’s time to deep dive the world of the aptly named (and priced) “High Quality Audio” tech, while trying not to spend our entire year’s budget in a single episode of browsing and wishful thinking…
If you’ve been with us since the beginning, you’ve probably at least figured out we’re just a little bit passionate about the tech we talk about each week…
And for better or for worse, we figured the only thing better than one piece of tech to chat on is… maybe three or four?
Okay, we admit it, you’re in for a bit of a roller coaster this week as we take a brisk run through the latest going on at Meta... first reactions to Apple’s “new” M2 MacBooks Pro… Atari celebrates 50 years… and finally wrap it up with some “what’s in the box” action with Asus’ new Zephyrus G14…
All that, and maybe even a few other bits sprinkled in because we can’t help ourselves… welcome to our very first Solid State “Parts Bin” episode…
The words “click to subscribe” may be one of the more immortalized of this generation… let’s face it, it’s everywhere!
Most of the time it’s a hook… to ensure that content garners someone’s attention not just once, but hopefully many times down the road…
But if we take a step above the “harmless” transaction of subscription… the economies in question quite literally change the moment actual currency enters the equation…
Yep, we’re talking subscription services this week… from the ubiquitous red envelop in every mailbox on your street (once upon a time) to vacuum-packed food cooked with a button-press so simple maybe you should have just had it cooked for you and delivered in the first place?
So this week let’s take stock of where those credit card charge are actually going in $9.99 increments, while remembering to go hit “subscribe” on this show while you’re at it?
If you’ve listed to this show for more than a minute, you know we love this tech and the possibilities it opens up to the world every day…
But as with quite literally everything else in life, all of that wonder and amazement comes at the price of responsibility and an imperative to try and stay one half-step ahead of those out to do you harm… be it for profit, hate, or sadly even simple boredom…
We strive to keep it positive here on Solid State, and in the end this week is no different, so join us as we take a first of probably many looks at getting the most out of that tech while also keeping you, your family, and your work safe in an ever-evolving digital world…
This week on the Solid State Podcast, it’s the one you’ve all been waiting for, if what you’ve been waiting for is a pair of mostly brand new laptops… that you can’t buy yet…
A tour de force of highly sought-after features for your phones, tablets, and computers… that you can’t download yet…
And a thousand-dollar “solution” to the Studio Display’s basically un-usable webcam…
It’s an over-sized episode that’s even willing to be broken up into 4 easy installments at 0% interest…
Let’s dive right in, it’s time to take a walk through Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference 2022…
Throughout tech, there have been category-defining products since Day Zero…
A lot of Nintendo Switch owners remember their first Game Boy, performing a web search is too commonly called “Googling”, but very few have both disrupted an industry AND held onto relevance long after their sales fell off the proverbial cliff…
Today, we’re here to bit adieu to an old friend, while also considering how it’s been sticking with us for the long haul all along…
True, Apple has finally shuttered the sale of it’s last branded “iPod”, but let’s take a look at it’s past, affirm it’s impact on the present, and admit that maybe iPod’s effect will carry well into our future…
First’s are really important… first car, first job, even your first high-score on Space Invaders.
But for us, equally important were our first PCs. They weren’t flashy, fast, or necessarily made from compatible parts, but they were ours.
Looking back we owe a whole lot of who we are today professionally and even personally to those trusty machines, so today we’re giving them the moment in the podcast spotlight they deserve.
Taking more of a sprint down memory lane, it’s time to reminisce about our very own First PCs…
In a world where our largest companies are effectively the scale of some entire countries, it’s a true statement when people refer to I/O as Google’s own “State of the Union”...
Countless departments, teams, and visions colliding, inviting us to see through the haze of rhetoric and showmanship, attempting to piece together Google’s grand strategy for market dominance...
But it’s that very strategy that, too many, has appeared to elude Google for such a long time. Countless abandoned products, roads not taken, and big bets that delivered nothing short of vaporware...
This years I/O, though, seemed to feel a little different… and not just because some people were finally attending in person... but a thread could almost be seen, woven through each of the products, platforms, and feature announcements.
Let’s dive in both feet then, and see what lie’s ahead for Google, Android, and beyond at I/O 2022.
If you’re someone that embraces tech as a hobby, a job, or a “lifestyle”… you know it’s a space that’s literally got a term for everything…
Believe it or not, once upon a time smartphones were just “phones”… apps were just “software”… and meta just meant you were being a bit too self-referential…
But alas, as quickly as the technology evolves, so too does the phrasing, buzzwords, and outright meaning of otherwise common terminology…
So this week, were taking a deep dive into a word that once meant it was well after midnight in a grad school coffee house and is has now been co-opted by one of the largest companies in the world…
This is going to be a fun one, because it’s time to enter the Metaverse.
In tech, like virtually every other business, for better or worse there’s just names you know… whether it’s green aliens, four equal squares, or a certain fruit-shaped sticker on your friends rear window… these brands are the result of billions of dollars of marketing, strategy, and raw impressions.
But, what about some of the brands “behind” those brands? Chances are some of you can probably list the designer of every component in the custom PC chassis on your desk… For everyone else, though, their iPhone really was “designed by Apple in California” without a thought about the architecture of that A15 chip and the UK-based firm that makes it possible…
So here we are this week to ask the question, what's next… for arm?
When we agreed to sit down a make a show about “tech”, I don’t think we actually knew the depths and rabbit holes we were setting ourselves up for.
See it turns out this industry and the many gadgets it inspires long pre-dates the cloud, your smartphone, or even the PC itself.
This week we take a short-but-eventful trip in the way-back machine, to the heady days of turn tables and amplifiers, only to find out we’re actually talking through issues plaguing the industry this very moment.
Turn if up to eleven folks, it’s time to talk what’s next… for vinyl.
Building your own PC isn’t just one of the great pass-times for a gadget nerd… to many of us it’s more a right of passage. Countless hours of research, the restless wait for parts to arrive, and the rush of powering up your build the first time...
In direct contrast to this experience loved by so many, is the cold truth of the world we find ourselves in today… one of component shortages, sky-rocketing costs, and outright price scalping run rampant…
As with any good challenge, though, your hosts took it upon themselves to outmaneuver the system and are here this week to tell the tale, share some tips, and already start planning the NEXT custom build because, well, that’s just what we do…
There was a time, at least it doesn't FEEL that long ago... when my day was tied together by a single app that existed on nearly every device I owned and lived safely in a browser tab of those that didn't. That ubiquitous green bubble lived on every dock and was pinned in every favorites list. The same went for all of my friends, and we channeled everything from dinner plans to DragonCon through it. Many years later, that platform is on life support and has been "replaced" by an entirely-too-long list of successors. Oh yes, it's time we talked Google Hangouts... a History.
It's safe to say all of us (okay, mostly all of us) have accepted the fact that a very capable phone-shaped tracking device travels with us in our pockets every day. But what if that tracker wasn't so obvious, as recognizable, or worse yet as easily detectible? We're here to talk through what's going on with Apple Air Tags, including recent events and the latest software updates from Apple to make you more comfortable with yet one more (very intentional) tracker in your bag, keychain, or wallet...
Another year, another Unpacked event... but contrary to popular belief, the Solid State team feels there are more than a few items deserving a second look as one of the world's largest electronics brands unleashes its 2022 lineup. In this hands-on episode we ask the only question that matters, what's in the box... Samsung?
When Apple gets on stage (even a pre-recorded one...) with new products to announce, we can't help but grab the mics and bring you our reactions, first impressions, and a fair dose of speculation for what's next out of everyone's favorite Cupertino space ship...
Our hosts pose the question, when a company with the scale, reach, and resource of Microsoft decide to build a planet-scale AI and call it "The Singularity"... what could go wrong?
A pre-launch introduction to the Solid State Podcast, coming to you weekly starting on Friday 03/11/2022.