Solid State Podcast

If you want a sneak peek of the future, you just have to take a close enough look at the past… Different versions of that overall premise have popped up throughout my life, and I have to say it’s one that I hold particularly dear and true. The lens of history is such a valuable tool, especially when trying to get a sense of where we’re going as a society, as a person, or, in this case, in tech in general…

2025 wasn’t what I would c...

The meaning of things can just… change with time. It’s inescapable, nostalgia is very much a thing, and it’s honestly a tired trope at this point too. That said… sometimes when a thing changes, people insist on acting like it hasn’t and that might just border on (or run right over) the edge of insincerity. 

So with that in mind, it’s time for some real talk. In just a couple short weeks, tired from turkey and well… family… Black Fr...

Sometimes it’s hard to remember a time before the internet, but I do remember shelves in my bedroom growing up dedicated to an Encyclopedia collection. And then, some years later, I’d get another CD at our local bookstore guaranteeing several hours of access to America Online… and then once, well, online… I was certainly on the internet but that was a world without Google. Years after that Google was a cornerstone of the internet b...

This week on the Solid State Podcast… well there’s no sugar coating it… we, forgot to set a topic… 

Now let’s take stock of the positives first… everyone showed up on time, cameras worked on the first try, and the duct tape holding a rather important cable I was supposed to replace almost a year ago… still hasn’t given out. These are the makings of a great episode…

Until that fateful moment when one of my co-presenters… asked what ...

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? Tu...

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 en...

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,...

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… ...

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 h...

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 night...

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 f...

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 s...

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 ...

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...

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 no...

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 ...

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 unexpec...

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...

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 obje...