Solid State Podcast

It’s honestly very funny to me how you can look at a gadget and think one particular way about it… have a stray thought… and then suddenly look at that same gadget in a VERY different light…

Spoiler warning and all that jazz, but I recently had that exact experience with nothing other than my trusty, daily driver Apple Watch. 

There’s no getting around it, the Apple Watch didn’t just define a category, it de facto created it. Yes I...

This week on the Solid State Podcast… we’re another year older, certainly no wiser, and somehow just as not-on-time as ever… 

Yep, you guessed it… on March 11, 2022 we dropped the very first full episode of the show… the runtimes were a shorter, the content was honestly a bit smarter, and my gadget collection… okay it was already out of control but its definitely gotten worse over those years… 

So when our Anniversary date rolled a...

This week on the Solid State Podcast I… get to speak to you from the past. No, not in a Back to the Future kind of way… though that’d be pretty cool… instead its for the far more mundane reason that, when recording an episode “on the road” its important to remember two things… your recording equipment AND the source files for, you know, actually cutting together the show…

So, with that, here we are on a beautiful Florida morning on...

Many times we come to this show, whether it sounds like it or not… relatively prepared. The topic is clear, the message has been more-or-less thought through, and the banter, well, nothing can stop that from meandering… 

Other weeks though, it’s just not that easy. Tech is funny because it honestly orbits around the gravity of several “big” moments throughout the year. CES, Unpacked, WWDC, etc. The in between parts… well that’s aki...

When something get’s sufficiently commoditized… it almost reaches a point where you start thinking about that one “thing” as a single, cohesive object rather than the sum of its parts. For many, a car is a thing you sit inside of, press a button or two, and you’re suddenly being propelled down the highway to your eventual destination. For the petrolhead, though, that same car is a symphony of engineering… disparate pa...

Well… there’s no other way to say it… welcome to 2026 everyone! Yes I know, the more things change the more they stay the same and all that. Resolutions made and near-instantly broken. Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace flooded with all the… umm… “stuff” from last year that you need to get rid of to make room for all the… yeah… “stuff” that magically appeared over the holiday shopping season… and, as if that weren’t ...

A new year somehow always presents a… certain type of friction. 

We’re tempted, all at once, to think back reflectively on our most recent past while at the same time told to be visionaries about our quickly-approaching future (and beyond)…

Well, you’ve likely been listening long enough to know there’s… not a whole lot of what we would call “visionary” happening here at the Solid State Podcast but hey, at least we have fun doing it...

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...