Solid State Podcast

Episode 110 - Finding the "Plus" in Amazon's Alexa Plus

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 announcements with a… Desktop. Yep, you heard me… a modular, upgrade-focused… desktop. Now if that has you scratching your head for any number of reasons, A: you’re not alone… and B: just trust us, there’s more here than meets the eye…
Newer, faster SSDs are no tap from Samsung this week as well and, lets face it… faster is just faster… and that’s a good thing…
And last but certainly not least… the end of yet another era has arrived as we bid adieu to a product that in many ways kicked off a chain of events that led to how meetings are literally done today… this particular product just… wasn’t the one we use to do them…
All that leads to our feature though… and please do yourself a favor and preemptively unplug any and all smart speakers in earshot because, you guessed it (or maybe didn’t)… Amazon is finally ready(ish) to launch their AI/LLM/GenAI/Martian pixy-dust-infused Alexa upgrade known, yes you again guessed it… as Alexa Plus…
We probably spend too much time on this show talking about naming conventions, and I’m here to warn you today is no different, but I solemnly swear there’s more here than that even if Amazon didn’t exactly go out of their way to give us much to work with.
All that AND several tortured D&D references abound… what more can you ask for? Let’s dive in and find out…

Episode 109 - Surprise, there's a new iPhone! Kind of...

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 later we can pre-order them… and a week after that they’re living in our pocket for 2-3 years (or… you know, 11.5 months for some of us……)
This week however, the cycle broke. Yes, I know, we’ve had offshoot iPhone announcements in the past in the form of the “SE” line of phones. But, as I was aluding to earlier… this is different. The naming convention is ever so slightly but ever so importantly different… the parts bin this mid-cycle monster was crafted from was full of THIS years parts… and while the price has definitely gone up compared to 2022’s most recent entry, this one is actually spec’ed at a level a normal human being can use it successfully for more then 2-3 months rather than years… 
So, zooming out, where is all this going and more importantly… what does it mean? This isn’t just a microcosm of Apple wanting to “change things up”, the industry as a whole see’s something at play and is racing to meet it head-on rather than be washed beneath its waves. The Smartphone-driven growth of the last decade-plus is rapidly subsiding, we’ve talked time and time again about the advanced maturity of that market, and as quote-unquote “upgrades” are getting more and more iterative the fight for every purchase is becoming almost cut throat. 
Was simply slapping AI on the box going to ignite a fresh decade of consumer frenzy? Well, ask Humane…
Was making a phone magically fold in half going to convince droves of users to part with $2,000 for an impossibly fragile device? Samsung remains unsure…
All we can say is something is afoot, and when a player at the scale of Apple starts adjusting its stance to brace for impact, its past time to pay attention…

Episode 108 - What's next for the Switch 2 and the Galaxy S25

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 event finds its way into just about every January, and with it a certain theme takes shape… what is Samsung planning for their phones this year? Why the same thing they do every year, dear listener… try to take over the world…
I don’t mean in a literal sense (mostly), but in battle for space in the average person’s pocket, Samsung can make a certain case that’s exactly what it’s done! In the United States, at least, it has de facto become the default option if you’re not carrying an iPhone, period. 
And Samsung’s strategy here has been pretty straightforward… make a phone in just about every shape, size, bend, and price point you can imagine, and someone will buy it… So when its time for them to take the stage each January and show us the “next big thing” from one of the world’s preeminent technology brands, you kind of expect it to be a “big thing”, right? 
Enter the reality of the situation… the smartphone market is well past maturity, and sure things like foldable screens seem like the “wave of the future”… in the end Samsung (and many others like them) have gotten very good at making a glass and metal rectangle to live in our pockets and dominate our lives. 
So then, what did they have to stand up and talk about? Honestly that’s a very good question, but one thing hasn’t changed… its another year, another Unpacked, and Samsung still wants to take over the (smartphone) world…

Episode 107 - This year at CES 2025

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 year at CES, it seems I end up going through the same series of emotions with the pieces of tech (and, these days, the parade of car reveals that show up) at this gadget-palooza in the desert… 
I have several gadgets in my life that I continue to use quite literally every single day, and without fail each of them either have a new version or a new competitor on the scene as of about 72 hours ago… because that’s how tech works! My devices work great, they more than get the job done, and they’re all in better-than-average condition… but the newer ones are better, right? 
Based on specs, this is a pretty simple conversation… The newest laptops, TVs, handhelds, and assorted gizmos are faster, lighter, and more capable across the board… seemingly meaningless AI trickery on the box notwithstanding… so they’re “better”… right?
The funny part is, I also once had an old Porsche 944… it was nothing particularly special… my “daily driver” at the time was more comfortable, wildly more reliable… and I STILL grabbed the 944 keys and drove it every chance I got… 
New might well be better, but is it good? TBD… 

Episode 106 - What's next for Tech in 2025...

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 you don’t need and never use? Ebay will happily cut you a once-in-a-lifetime discount to do exactly that and even give you a fraction of the money back to… well… buy more crap you don’t need and will likely never use…
Some other things in tech especially, though, are just as predictable and hopefully at least a little more useful… CES starts in mere days, Samsung is loading the confetti cannons for yet another flagship unpacked event, and across the globe Product Managers are plastering whiteboards with their sure-fire bet on how their AI-driven product is going to totally work this time, revolutionize your life, and simultaneously empty your wallet…
While we may not love the spam, the scams, and the incessant promises of “It will definitely be better this year...”, it is all part of what makes this space so wild, crazy, and special. 
So as we have freshly bid adieux to 2024, it’s time now to fix our sights on what we think 2025 has in store for us… I mean, am I finally going to get my flying car? Let’s find out…

Episode 105 - A look back at the Tech-of-it-all in 2024

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 year…
It’s safe to say that “newsworthy” and “good” are not always synonyms… to be honest it sometimes seems like they rarely are. Was it a year of AI, for example? You bet, there’s just no deny thing that. Was it the year that AI became “good” or even meaningful in our daily life? No freakin way. 
And that’s just one example, it’s not a new phenomenon. For every iPod there’s a Zune, and hopefully there will be a day ahead where we look even further back, for example, at a chunk of red plastic that promised to change our lives by using the internet for us for… reasons… and say “you know what, that really was where it all began...”
But that’s ahead of us, pages of the story still to be written and that, well, is for a very different episode! Today, again, we’re going to take a stroll in reverse and see if we can figure out what central theme this “year in tech” might have had, and then see what direction it points us down the road…

Episode 104 - End of Year Cybersecurity Best Practices

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 her your wallet address before 5pm…
Today though, with the advent of advanced AI models and an ever-increasing quantity of… well, crap coming to our Inboxes, timelines, and feeds every minute… being vigilant isn’t just a best practice, it’s becoming a key part of survival. 
I wish I could say, dear listener, “Just tune in for an hour, do these five things every day, and you’ll be 100% guaranteed to be safe from cyber criminals and their hijinks…” but that would be about as big a lie as the Bitcoins promised a few moments ago…
You see, there is no silver bullet, no impenetrable shield of protection on the internet… It’s about layers of security, an ongoing need to improve and educate, and the acknowledgment that someday a real problem is going to arise and it’s up to you to have a plan in place to identify, respond, and recover from it…
These may sound like training materials for a bank, law firm, or investment advisor… and you’d be right. But they’re also sound best practices for every single one of us that intends to exist online and participate in the global web… 
Now, first go update your phone, your apps, and your thermostat… then hit Play and let’s talk about how we can all protect ourselves and each other as we wrap up 2024 and continue to look for what’s ahead…

Episode 103 - The Deals and Don'ts of Black Friday 2024

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 had, heck some of them are really good! The problem is, they’re surrounded by hoodwinks, half-truths, and the occasional outright Scam…
An example of what I would kindly call an entry in the “half truth” category happened to me just this week… I’ve been without a gaming-capable laptop for a little while (Don’t get me started on my journey with that Minivan-sized Razer Blade a couple years ago…), and decided it was time… so the Deal Research commenced!
What I found was a very good field of laptop options out there in 2024, with the year being pretty quiet for GPU change but a ton happening in the CPU space… which finally lead me to a tried-and-true Asus Zephyrus line… 
You’d think… it’d be that easy… right? I know the make and more-or-less model… now just to find the best deal offered… or so I thought! 
Instead I had to dig into Model sub-numbers, Processor SKU’s, and the occasional bribe (I mostly kid) to finally land on the exact one I wanted… which, as luck would have it… was the only model not on sale this year because, even though is a “2024” model just like the rest, that particular one only came out a couple months ago and was deemed “to new” for a discount… 
So see, you can save, but its probably not on the latest/greatest option… and at the end of the day, is a couple hundred bucks off the top worth getting an inferior experience over years of use? 
You’ve all been listening long enough to know what I did… and oh, by the way, there was an Open Box option that was twice as much off as the Black Friday “Deal”… just sayin…

Episode 102 - Solid State games like it's 1994...

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” a moment ago, right? 
Funny enough, as I was considering that ill-fated device a few days ago, it occurred to me that while their implementation didn’t exactly work out… there have been wildly successful games played, worlds built, and stories told by doing exactly that for literally decades… that generated right there in our own brains, massive armies have clashed, new worlds explored, and lasting friendships made, all in vivid detail in front of our very “eyes”…
No, I’m not talking about some super-secret VR project pulled right from the pages of a never-produced Star Trek script… I’m talking about the power of story, leveraged on the processing power of imagination, and expressed in one of the most polarizing mediums around… 
Yep, I’m talking about reams of paper, bags of dice in every shape, size, and count, and more painted chunks of plastic than you can shake an Orc at…
Gaming is certainly not a new topic to this show, but taking a look back at the last five decades of table top games we realized… some very talented creatives, story tellers, and mostly-sober DM’s have been hacking the GPU of our brains this entire time…

Episode 101 - Return of the Mac (Mini)

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 watch, this sure seemed to be shaping up into an iPad mini level of spec-bump fueled recycled yawns…
Well, dear friends... we… were… wrong…
Do the iMac and MacBook Pro look effectively identical to their predecessors save a few new color options? Sure do.
Did we get the larger (correctly) screened iMac option I’ve been holding space for on my desk for several years at this point? Not a chance. 
Was this potentially one of the most meaningful round of updates to the Mac lineup since the introduction of Apple Silicon? One hundred percent. 
MacBooks Pros? Fastest, most capable lineup from the baseline to the top with more battery life than ever before. 
iMacs start at enough RAM to actually recommend, get the same end-to-end performance bump, and are easier to recommend as an all-purpose hub computer than ever before. 
And then, finally, the most easily forgotten Mac got the biggest upgrade of them all…
We’ve said here countless times how the MacBook Air is the “laptop for everyone” (and with 16GB of secretly starting RAM mores than every, by the way), and we’re here to tell you the Mac mini is now firmly, without a doubt, with zero direct competition, the do-all desktop for nearly everyone…
Tiny footprint, incredible horsepower, ports front-and-back (finally), and a starting price of $599?
What can I say, we’ll take two…