Solid State Podcast

Episode 131 - A look back at the Tech of 2025

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 call a banner year… yes a lot “happened” but I wouldn’t call most of those things a disruption. Sure OpenAI and others would happily disagree with me, but I have to say I’m still setting kitchen timers these same way, continuing to answer my own emails, and the pile of dishes still needing done from dinner suggest nothing has changed there, either. 
That said, though, plenty did still happen across 2025… well established, category-owning names have found themselves in a fresh fight for relevance, assumptions around what it is to be the “best” product in a category (even from a single lineup) were challenged, and once again I foolishly wandered into the Virtual Reality space to ask the question… is this something? 
Yep, as we wrap up the year, in many ways it was a whirlwind yet in others it was… aggressively business as usual. Oddly enough… I have to wonder if I’ll feel the same way when looking back on 2025… a little further down the road?
For now, I’ll leave that to the historians… 

Episode 130 - What does $1,000 (and less) get us on Black Friday 2025?

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 Friday will arrive for us all. See, once upon a time that meant one thing… consume as much caffeine as possible, pile into a car (or several of them), and proceed to wander aimlessly around the nearest Outlet mall hoping to score the latest season of Big Bang Theory for no less than $5 cheaper than any other day of the year. Or was that just me? 
Could you save some money? Sure. Would emotions, relationships, and raw humanity be tested endlessly? All but certainly. Was it worth it? I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me. 
Now flash forward to more recent years and… let’s just face it… the thing has changed. Sure there’s still a day, sure there’s even still endless lines and supposed “door busters” to be had. But I can also confidently tell you that “Black Friday” started much closer to October 31st than November 28th and that’s… just the way things are. 
So all the advertisements, emails, and circulars can tell you about an impending ONE-DAY-ONLY opportunity right around the corner… I’m here to tell you those and many other deals are here today, they were here two weeks ago, and they’ll all but certainly be around two weeks after. 
And to put that theory to the test, we armed ourselves with a pile of Monopoly money and asked the only question that matters… what does several thousand dollars get you on Black Friday 2025?
Check please…

Episode 129 - OpenAI launched the Atlas browser... that's good, right?

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 but you were getting there in a window (not a tab) in Internet Explorer. Then, in possibly the final form of that era of the internet… you had broadband bandwidth, a Chrome browser, and the indexed power of the full internet through a Google search baked into every tab. 
Why the mini history lesson of the Internet? Because, in the end, it took a browser to cement Google’s place atop the mountain of that era. So, as we sit here on the precipice of a brand new one… with LLM’s, AI powered agents, and Generative AI everywhere we turn… should it really surprise us that one of the names attached at the hip to this moment is suddenly very, very excited to be launching their very own web browser? 
Yes, platforms like ChatGPT are changing our relationship not only with the internet but with technology itself. It may be riddled with issues, under delivered promises, and outright broken concepts (because it is), but the inescapable truth is there’s also no going back. But with massive swaths of our daily lives at work, at home, and many places in between still taking place in a browser tab… are we ready to cede it to the very ones charting the course of this next technological era? 
George Lucas once said that Star Wars “rhymes”… it was an eloquent-ish way of saying it repeats itself… a lot. At this point I’m pretty sure tech does, too…

Episode 128 - Parts Bin of all the things (Goodbye Windows 10, hello Apple M5, and more...)

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 we were actually here to talk about this week…
Did we cancel? Absolutely not. Did we pivot? Ehh?! Have we proven once again that the three of us can sit down, no agenda, and fill 60+ plus minutes talking about the various ways we either have or plan to waste our money on gadgets and wider tech this season? Well what do you think…
Maybe go make an extra cup of coffee, and probably some other preferred sugar delivery system on the way back to settle in because this one… it’s a ride. 
Aaaaand I’m pretty sure that piece of tape is actually about to give so… we’ll be right back…

Episode 127 - Looking at each other during

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? Turns out that’s not because of the call lag. Running way over on time? That definitely didn’t get any better. Having the opportunity to do something so “routine” shoulder-to-shoulder with two of the best in the biz? As they say… priceless. 
The only sadness to be found in the room was the realization after the red light turned off was that this really was a “once in a blue moon” opportunity… next go around we’ll be back in front of our cameras, poorly lit by monitors and effects lights, wondering why we can’t pick a better time of day to do this. 
Or… who knows… maybe we’ve got even more in store just around the corner. Guess you’ll have to wait and see…

Episode 126 - The Gadgets of Gadget Season 2025 (Hands-on... mostly)

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 entire year-to-date of announcements, developer conferences, thinly veiled teases, and giant quote-unquote “leaks”… this is the time when the devices get packed, the tracking numbers are issued, and the highly rendered version in the advertisement of whatever we spent our money on runs face-first into this harsh thing called reality. 
Do we watch said tracking from shipment-to-delivery with the excitement of a child staring at the chimney on Christmas Eve? More than I’d like to admit. Will any of this year’s lineup of next-big-things change any our lives? Most certainly not. Are any of them even any good? Guess that’s why you’re here, now isn’t it? 
With no further ado, we’re going to chat through some glasses that are here, some slightly more interesting glasses that… aren’t… as well as newly arrived earbuds, smartphones, and even watches from both this century and last… I promise, that one will make more sense in the wrap. 
Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, we even have a tease of our own at the end of the show… what can I say, we couldn’t help ourselves? Guess you’ll have to listen and find out… and hey, no skipping! 
Spoilers…

Episode 125 - Are those new iPhones in the Air? (iPhone 17 Launch Event)

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, “S” was for Siri, come at me I’ll die on that hill), the long days of summer begin slipping into recent memory and a fall of holiday shopping, (hopefully) cooling temperatures, and shiny new iPhones have been cornerstones over since.
Is this the end of Apple’s “year”? Almost certainly not. But even with iPads, processors, and other accessories still to come in the weeks and months ahead, it’s still impossible to ignore that this remains “The Big One”…
And, to be fair, it’s (as usual) not just phones on tap here… we’ve got AirPods and an assortment of watches to get through as well… 
In the end, the final question is really the only one that matters… are any of these gadgets your next one? Let’s find out…

Episode 124 - The thing about "Handheld" Gaming in 2025

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… school-aged John would have had one agenda… a day off in pajamas filled with Mario, Pokemon, and Mega Man on nothing other than my trusty Gameboy…
So it’s no wonder, these literal decades later, that on stuffy-headed days like today I have a nearly innate yearning to pickup my Gameboy’s spiritual successor the Switch an proceed “recovering” on the couch to the subtle tones of Zelda’s background music…
In that moment, though, it hits me… yes the Switch is “portable”, I guess you can even call it “hand held” (with two hands, looking at you, dbrand)... but the equation has changed SO much since the still very pocket-able Gameboy days (and the DS, 3DS, even 3DS XL that followed). 
So the question is, have we lost something in translation? Was the true best, final form of the portable gaming device a foot-wide slab that mostly fits in a backpack? Or are we missing out on the best 10-15 minutes of gaming we could find here and there when still truly amazing titles were along for the ride in our pocket. 
Battery just finished charging, so lets find out…

Episode 123 - Can Jimmy Fallon save the Google Pixel?

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 home buttons, scroll balls… heck, even a headphone jack… and what occurred to me the further I went “back in time” was how much more diverse and, well, obvious the design choices were. One manufacturer might try a “chin” at the bottom of their phone, thinking the would be the thing to make them stand out, while at basically the same time others would try not-so-subtle curves to their glass. 
These choices, some paradigm shifting and some… not… did at the very least lead to generation after generation of devices that you could actually tell apart from across a crowded room. Today, for the most part though, you nearly have to hold the phone just right in the light to make out the logo on the back or risk uttering the wrong brand in conversation…
The one place this “unified theory of phone design” doesn’t seem to have set in, yet at least, is over in foldables. Yes, they obviously have certain qualities in common like, you know, a hinge… but past that we see companies trying different paths still in aspect ratio, material design, even dare-I-say form factor…
So, when given the chance to look at the paths chosen by Samsung and Google in nearly-consecutive weeks, it’s honestly so much more entertaining to take in the technical advances, sure, but really spend our time interrogating the choices then went into making these things. Why go wider instead of taller? Should it open to be more square, or rectangle? Need we continue to fear dust or 50 grams of added weight in our pockets more? 
The answer to all the above came from a meeting, a design group, a decision… and now we have these devices in our lives to ask the only obvious question in reply… who made the right call? 

Episode 122 - The thing about roleing a Nat Twenty...

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 nights on the couch, controller in hand, with just one more boss to beat… and realized before all those pixels, frames, and gigahertz was a dark room, a table, and friends with character sheets in one hand and dice in the other… 
Table top Roleplaying Games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and the myriad of others like them have gone through something of a cultural resurgence in the last decade for sure. From Stranger Things to Baldur’s Gate to… well… a literal movie called “Dungeon’s & Dragons” starring none other than a Potato Dragon… But even before they found their way into the hearts and minds of a seemingly whole new generation of fans, characters, and future DMs… there was still a quiet army of devoted fans rolling out a map, putting on background music, and hosting their regular game night. 
And that’s the part we couldn’t ignore any longer… sure there is literally no tech to be found here… except that every single ounce of our love of all-things-technology, gadgets, and “the future” has direct connective tissue to the creativity, imagination, and… fun that starts sitting around that table.
So screens off, ringers to silent, and grab your dice (you know you’ve got ‘em)… let’s play.