Solid State Podcast

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...

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 t...

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 fo...

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 announcem...

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 lat...

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 eve...

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...

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 yo...

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...

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...

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 h...

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...

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 wa...

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 actuall...

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 hacker...

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,...

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… ...