Solid State Podcast

Episode 98 - The thing about the Sony Playstation 5 "Pro"

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, and possibly intergalactic politics? I’m still a little fuzzy on that one…
As we burst out the other side, the thing we actually came to talk about takes shape in the early coverage of Sony’s upcoming Playstation 5 “Pro”… I know this is an audio format, but I so very sincerely hope you can both hear the air-quotes around the word and, frankly, see the eye roll now forever locked on my face… 
Is it an upgrade? Is the upgrade worth the price? What does the word “Pro” even mean any more? If you think that’s all you were going to get from this week’s feature… well… yeah you guessed it… it devolved into yet a second caffeine-fueled journey through our collective fix for everything wrong (apparently) in tech, media, gaming, and possibly intergalactic politics… No, really, I have no idea…
We usually record this in the wee hours of the morning, and due to all-things-life this one hit right after 5pm on a lovely September evening… and maybe that’s the problem with us being a little too awake when the record button was pressed… 
Either way, this is a fun one guys, so pause your current game of Astro Bot and let’s take a little journey…

Episode 97 - Apple's "Glowtime" iPhone 16, Apple Watch, and AirPods Event

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… a broader approach. And boy howdy, was this one the latter. 
Not to say the iPhone itself was an afterthought… not by a long shot actually. But the sheer length of the event couple with the breakneck pace of announcements did have us wondering at times if the phones were ever going to come! In the end though, as the dust settles around Cupertino, we have a shockingly wide array of new entries ranging from the barely-worth-mentioning all the way to me genuinely losing a bet … 
But after you strip away the over-90-minute runtime, the plethora of products, and the “why are we even here” nature of all things AI… what we’re left with is what appears to be an Apple in a state of flux. In many ways, this was a rock-solid iPhone announcement, bringing with it one of the most compelling stories for an entry in the family in years that for once isn’t just because it’s the “most expensive so therefore ‘good’ one”… but in several other ways there’s no mistaking Apple reacting to what can only be outside pressure in some seemingly un-Apple’y ways…
We make the joke often enough about the age old tale of “change the shape or color of an iPod and we’ll sell a million more”… but that seemed to be much more tangibly the strategy here for several topics we’ll cover. 
In the end though, phones were announced, reviews are on the way, and the same question we face every 12 months is upon us… is it upgrade time? 

Episode 96 - The State of Headphones in 2024

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 server… No, it’s the supporting actors around your decision. Once we know which TV we’re going with, how is it going to be mounted? Picked a laptop? Great, what’s your docking solution look like when you’re actually in the office. And don’t me started on servers because, yes, licensing is very much a thing and you do in fact have to buy enough of it… 
So when the Solid State team sat down the other day and the subject of headphones came up, I couldn’t help think about them far-too-often being the last minute decision people make. Oh they’re plenty excited about a new game console, smartphone, or other gadget but eventually you’re going to want to use that gadget in a place where broadcasting your latest kill streak in Call of Duty to the masses just wouldn’t be appropriate…
As with literally anything in tech, there are so many options out there, and price among others can be a big deciding factor. But also use case, comfort, feature set… all of these carry weight to influence a final purchasing decision. 
In the end, we knew what we had to do… pull out the Monopoly money and do some shopping… as we navigate the State of Headphones in 2024…

Episode 95 - Google's Pixel 9 Launch Event

This week on the Solid State Podcast, it’s all-Google all-the-time… thankfully not (as much) in a “how badly are they getting sued this time” kind of way, but instead with a slate of new Pixel phones, earbuds, watches, and all-things-Gemini packaged up in a launch event that in our opinion just feels… “different” in the context of those pesky lawsuits we mentioned…
Pixel itself isn’t new to Google, far from it… and their storied history of smartphone development goes much farther back even to the good ‘ol days of the Nexus program.
But with a looming threat of regulatory action changing the way Google (and tech in general) is able to conduct its business, operating Pixel as some kind of decently well-funded side project because they “have to” just isn’t likely to cut it any more. If Pixel was suddenly a standalone company with its own stock performance to defend, investors to pacify, and competitors to… well… compete with… how would it do? Would we suddenly have the next great battle for smartphone supremacy, or would Pixel fade away Back to the Future style? 
Regardless of the hint of regulation in the air, this was still a gadget event and oh boy did Google deliver on that front! AI is front and center, of course… but the devices themselves have a very interesting story to tell about where Google see’s these products going, and just how they intend to get there. New devices across the lineup, a very strong looking second act in the foldable space, and supporting actor credits to a new smart watch and earbuds all add up to a fall lineup that might be (and should be) hard to ignore…
Now, I’m still trying to figure out how much storage this S24 Ultra has to properly calculate its trade-in value, the irony is I think I’ll have to Google it…

Episode 94 - Google's a monopoly and the Apple Vision Pro 6 (ish) months in...

If you’ve been even remotely nerd-culture adjacent, then chances are pretty good you’ve seen an episode or twenty of Star Trek, in the case of this example the fan-favorite “Next Generation” series…
See, this re-imagining of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision from the 1960’s of a distant future of galavanting space cowboys had a pretty tall order to fill… be respectful of the original material, chart a wholly new path forward, and do it on the shoulders of a mostly unheard-of cast of actors running around in multicolored pajamas waiving handheld vacuum cleaners at aliens that almost always spoke perfect English…
Well, one of the ways The Next Generation’s writers found to tell the “same old story” in some new and interesting ways was by leaning in on the technology of this fantastical future, and as one of those kids with his eyes glued far too close to the screen for more hours than my mother ever knew about… the best expression of that even-more-future tech was this black cube of a room, criss-crossed with neon yellow lines that, at the mere prompt of a request, would place you in a perfect reproduction of just about any place you could imagine. It was called a Holodeck and, well, it was magical! 
Want to see the explosion of Pompeii from a mostly-safe distance? No problem. Get in some light cardio doing hand-to-hand combat with never ending waves of vampires? Coming right up. Walk across the moon in shorts and flip flops just because you can? Okay, now this is starting to sound more like a Doctor Who episode, but I digress…
See, even in this world of fictional teleporters, Warp Drive, and 3D printers (AHEM), I mean Replicators… I was still most fascinated by a room what could place you anywhere, in any time, in the blink of an eye. 
So, rewind and fast forward to 2024 and sitting on the table in front of me is a metal, glass, and fabric pair of glorified ski googles that, among many other things, claims to be able to transport me to distant worlds, see timeless pieces of art, or kick back with a re-run of Red Dwarf… all from the comfort of my living room. Is this the beginning of my childhood Holodeck dream, or an overpriced express of technology hubris over-reaching itself. Battery’s finally recharged, let’s go find out…

Episode 93 - Things are happening in the CPU and AI chip space...

Quite a ways back, we did an episode about our first computers… Cody’s was recent enough to almost be usable today, Eric’s was long enough ago it arrived as spare parts that more resembled a TI calculator, and mine was right in the middle… the hallmark of mid-90’s computing it was an off-white beast of a tower with dual disk drives, fans you could hear from the driveway, and enough RAM to almost run 3 programs at once… as long as one of those programs was Calculator… 
I remember everything about that computer because it was “mine”, but the one I remember possibly even more fondly than it came several years later… they had a lot in common… the tower was still obnoxiously large (just black now with a glass see-through panel on the side), it still had two disk drives but one was a DVD player now, and at the heart of it was an Intel Core2Duo “Allendale” series CPU. It had two cores (hence the “Duo”), was built on a 65 nanometer processes, and consistently hit temperatures normally reserved for the molten core of a small moon or large planet-killing space station… 
All of those specs are burned into my brain because this particular computer was the first one I built entirely myself, from scratch. I had upgraded and modded my PCs for years of course, but my freshman year of college I saved every dollar I could find and built one part at a time what felt like a colossus of gaming and computing horsepower.
Today, the phone in my pocket would literally run circles around that beast many times over. But the hours I spent on that one component at its heart, choosing that “perfect CPU” was a labor of love that obviously is etched into my memory even today. 
So as we look at the computing landscape right now of AI chips, “Copilot Plus” PCs, and an arms race of cores, nanometers, and TOPS figures, the common thread is the beating heart at the middle of it all. The CPU wars are in once again in full swing, and frankly there are already a few casualties. Let’s dive in…

Episode 92 - The thing about Starlink and "Space Internet"

A couple short years ago I sat down in this very chair, in front of this computer, and recorded the intro for an episode of this show. It would have been a pretty normal “day ending in Y” had it not been for the rising sound of wind outside and the fact that I couldn’t see through my office window due to the solid metal storm shutters in place. 
Hurricane Ian was mere hours away from its historic landfill just miles from where I sit. I remain grateful to this day for every one of those miles, as they were in large part the difference in my ability to consider myself a responder and not a victim of what was about to come for my home. 
We talked that day about “disaster tech” and the kind of gear and gadgets we would always recommend to have around for just such en event. Solar generators, cellular hotspots, and the like were all on tap. But less than twenty four hours later, my own solar generator steadfastly keeping my phone and laptop charged and at the ready, what became immediately clear was that with all the backup power in the world, the mission critical tools of our trade were effectively paperweights without one key lifeline… the internet. 
This is obviously no great revelation, the reliance of business and frankly day-to-day life in America has been near wholly reliant on internet access for many years at this point. But to have it effectively and so completely disappear in what felt last an instant was technological whiplash nonetheless. People would huddle in groups at a nearby Target because one bar of cell signal was allegedly working, others would send SMS texts from internet-enabled vantage points to others that had no such access to provide sorely needed weather, recovery, and resource updates. 
It wasn’t until far too long after Ian had moved on that a relatively new option started to appear in some places we sorely needed it most… a rectangle piece of metal and plastic, emblazoned with the word “Starlink”, and a single Ethernet cable coming out the other end with a promise of restoring communications for those that needed it most in a time where minutes counted for hours. 
Thankfully this morning, there’s no wind to be heard and I can clearly see the beautiful morning through my un-shuttered window. But, in all reality, it will happen again. This time, though, in at least one small but very important way, we’ll be ready…

Episode 91 - Samsung's Summer Unpacked Event with new Galaxy Foldables, Watches, Earbuds, and Ring

This week on the Solid State Podcast, we tricked ourselves into thinking this would be a “quick one”… 
See, at first you can’t really blame us… Samsung had their (formerly “Fall”, now very much Summer) Unpacked event focused on their foldable phone hardware plus a smattering of other devices and, on paper at least, it seemed like kind of a snoozer…
Screens got a little bigger, hinges got a little tougher, and some earbuds suddenly got very familiar looking… but other than that “business as usual” sure seemed to be the name of the game this year. 
And honestly, that still might end up being the case, but as we’ve seen happen several other times across the industry and the years, we can’t help but wonder if the sum total of the changes, additions, and updates add up to… I don’t know, “more”! 
Throw in that on top of all that AI keeps shoving itself to the forefront of the “feature list”, and Samsung frankly just lobbed a ring-shaped grenade into Oura’s back yard, yelled YOLO, and added yet another seemingly-compelling reason to pitch your tent in their every-growing walled garden and hope for the best. 
We say it around here all the time, two companies “competing” isn’t a healthy field of competition, but at the very least Apple and Samsung do keep incentivizing each other to do one thing better and better… as long as that thing is “looking more and more alike”…
Again, there might just be more there than meets the eye, or it may be a year to kick back, keep enjoying last year's phone, and hope next time things get a little more interesting. Let’s see if we can find out which one we’ve got on our hands here in 2024…

Episode 90 - Film Photography is back and we review Meta's Ray-Ban Wayfarer AI smart glasses

This week on the Solid State Podcast, we mix things up a little bit…
Not just by constantly going off the rails, because let’s face it you just expect that at this point. Instead we’re opening up with what’s “in the news”, specifically on a relatively sudden resurgence in the physical film photography industry. New camera bodies to choose from, old and new names returning to the table with novel takes on film roles, and yet another perspective on our ongoing question of “what is a photo” in this world of generative AI, computational photography, and more. In a world where every other post to Instagram is more fiction-than-fact, is a cell of film that (for better or worse) captures a moment “as it really was” suddenly more valuable than ever? 
On then to our feature topic this week, and it’s none other than a “what’s in the box” style review of Meta’s seemingly fantastic Wayfarer AI-powered smart glasses. These are hardly a “new” gadget, in fact they’ve been on store shelves for quite some time now but it feels like the true moment around them is just now starting to heat up. Meta continues to steadily improve the software, add features, and somewhat-quietly build out one of the most compelling wearables on the market today. 
Last but certainly not least, Eric and I wrap things up with a heartfelt nod to one of our industry’s greats with an homage to the very moments that made the intersection of technology and the humanities the core of what we do…
With no further ado, on to the show…

Episode 89 - We review Microsoft's Surface Copilot Plus PCs

I’ve unboxed a lot of gadgets through the years… maybe too many? Okay, that’s a lie, and one of them I sincerely will never forget was shockingly almost 12 years ago when a box arrived on my desk from Microsoft that contained, in their minds at least, the next-big-thing in Personal Computing… 
See, just a couple years prior, a certain company in Cupertino changed the landscape with the announcement of a slab of metal and glass that ran apps, had a decent(ish) web browser, and a battery that lasted seemingly forever. In all honesty, they couldn’t actually do all that much compared to even a run-of-the-mill laptop of the day, but there was still something there. Something new, special. 
Microsoft, of course, had to have a response to in the Fall of 2012 Surface was born. Now, because it is Microsoft after all, it couldn’t be a total reimagining of what a computer does because, well, a lot of people use PCs and they expect their software to run even if it was last updated during the Clinton administration…
So what made the box that arrived that day special was that this was, even for Microsoft, something different. This particular “Surface” device, as it was called, was the “RT” model… a name almost as confusing as the device itself. It ran Windows… kind of. It could run many of the applications I needed… sort of. And the performance should be top notch… occasionally. Because beating at the heart of this “RT” model was an ARM based processor unlike any seen in a Microsoft device before, the same core type running in Apple’s now-wildly-popular iPad. 
Sadly what we did get was a hot, slow, incompatible device, but one that still represented the beginning of a journey, that so far has now led to the launch of Copilot Plus PCs, a series of both first and third party offerings in Microsoft’s latest Windows-on-ARM attempt. Battery life? Check. Compatibility? Pretty darn good. Performance? Oh yeah…
It was a long road to get here from that ill-conceived paperweight in 2012, but man, this is getting interesting…