Solid State Podcast

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...

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...

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 b...

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 Intelligen...

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...

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...

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 v...

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 experien...

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 throug...

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 Pix...

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 b...

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...

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 normall...

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 dec...

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 even...

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...

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 necessa...

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-i...

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 o...

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...

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 e...

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-...

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-e...

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 simp...

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 COVI...