Solid State Podcast

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…

Episode 100 - The one where they did 100 episodes...

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 actually do have too much stuff…
I for sure am counted among them, and while I do survive the occasional purge of “when was the last time we used this…”, some things I just can’t part with. It might be a memento from a long-past adventure, or a seemingly worthless trinket that ties back to a now-gone loved one, and other times… it’s literally a piece of paper.To me, at least, this is no ordinary piece of paper… Sure, its a pretty typical 6” x 4” sheet of lined yellow note paper with some worse-than-average bullet points scribbled on it, but to me it’s not only something I keep, it lives proudly on a shelf of admiration.
See, once upon a time, three friends decided they talk entirely too much about tech, gadgets, games, and… well, life… and eventually they started doing it in front of a microphone and shipping it out to the internet. A few people listed, a lot of laughs were had, and way too much caffeine was consumed…
The year was 2012, the podcast wasn’t even this one, but it’s still what I think about when contemplating the origins of the Solid State Podcast and how we got here twelve years later…
So that piece of paper, it was our very first topic list from our very first episode on a show long lost to the internet, but here in 2024 I still look at that piece of paper at least once a week. 
We definitely have too much stuff, but I’m going to go put this paper back up on the shelf where it belongs…

Episode 99 - New Sonos, "New" iPad Mini's, and Cybersecurity Awareness Month

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 hackers and cyber criminals, the new accounts were for a bitcoin exchange service, and the servers we were connected to were riddled with ransomware and now-encrypted, useless data. 
The worst had happened. The “if” had become “when”. A company had been attacked, the bad guys had gotten through, and we received the call to try and save the day. 
Turning back the clock to “before the boom” as professionals in our space call it, the chain of events leading up to the one, terrible moment were border-line obvious and spanned years of single decisions that added up to a cocktail for disaster. A series of budget cuts led to not having the funds to authorize a modernization project that would have moved their backups immutably, to the cloud. An aging Line of Business application was “too important to risk upending” and left server infrastructure frozen in time at a now-unsupported, unpatched state. An email arrived that was hugely important, very time sensitive, and entirely fake. This, is the recipe for the very “boom” I mentioned before. 
The rest was history, the hackers struck and encrypted (but didn’t steal) their data. We received the call, made every effort to find a way out of it, to find there simply wasn’t one. And, as many business staring at a potentially endgame event have done, bitcoin was purchased, the criminals were paid off, and true to their word (this time) the ability to decrypt the data was handed over and many sleepless days later business was returning to normal. 
This is just one event of millions like it, and they’re getting worse every year. October, you see, is “Cybersecurity Awareness Month”, and while the vigilance we need to have never gets a break, its still good to take a beat, have the tough conversations, and decide for ourselves, our businesses, and as… people… what is the true cost of not being prepared…
PS - The link to this month's Cybersecurity Awareness "Tech Bytes" segment on SWFL's ABC 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQEQrRawnHI

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…