Solid State Podcast

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 furt...

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 i...

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 th...

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… S...

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 othe...

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 suddenl...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, Sam...

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...

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 ho...

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 headline...

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 ha...

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-sav...

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 h...

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 n...

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 ou...

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...

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 (...

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 even...

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...