Solid State Podcast

It’s honestly very funny to me how you can look at a gadget and think one particular way about it… have a stray thought… and then suddenly look at that same gadget in a VERY different light…
Spoiler warning and all that jazz, but I recently had that exact experience with nothing other than my trusty, daily driver Apple Watch. 
There’s no getting around it, the Apple Watch didn’t just define a category, it de facto created it. Yes I know, every Pebble owner and Moto 360 faithful (you know who you are) is clamoring for their keyboard to email me as I speak… but it simply can’t be ignored that like the iPad, the iPhone, and yes the venerable iPod before it, the Apple Watch made wearables the market it is today. Oh, and it continues to sit atop it. 
So taking all of that and somehow… setting it aside… is it good for me? Apple says this device is a health and fitness forward piece of technology… designed to make your day easier, your Walled Garden journey more fruitful, and your heart beat ever-so-better…
And honestly… all of that is true. The ways I’ve integrated it into my daily workflow have made it easier. The integration with the other Apple-driven services in my life are borderline flawless. And, as someone who went through a substantial health journey over the last five years… I don’t know if I would have gotten here without that watch. Oh, and possibly more important… those three colored rings……
And that's the thought I had the other day, the one that made me gaze at my wrist in an entirely different light for the first time in over a decade. My jeans are a different size today than if I hadn’t had that tool, there’s almost no doubt about that. But here, now, in 2026… am I an addict? 
Well dear listener, in true Solid State fashion there’s only one way to find out… let’s dive in…

This week on the Solid State Podcast… we’re another year older, certainly no wiser, and somehow just as not-on-time as ever… 
Yep, you guessed it… on March 11, 2022 we dropped the very first full episode of the show… the runtimes were a shorter, the content was honestly a bit smarter, and my gadget collection… okay it was already out of control but its definitely gotten worse over those years… 
So when our Anniversary date rolled around we sat down, prepped a show around it, and then I proceeded to get whatever the heck this “cold” is that seemingly everyone I know has lately and lets face it… you didn’t want to listen to whatever that would have been for an hour. 
So, in the most on-brand way possible, we come to you Four Years and One Week into this whole things to deliver not just a walk down memory lane but also to connect the dots over those years and ask ourselves… how much has really changed? 
Vinyl? Still flying off the shelves. Building a PC in 2026? Somehow more expensive than in 2022. Oh and the “Singularity”? I don’t know who’s idea it was to launch this show talking about a global-scale AI platform but… uh… yeah……
There’s nothing else to say other than, everything else aside… Thank You. Thank you for four years (okay, and a week) of laughs, bad puns, and tortured credit cards… and here’s to a heck-of-a-lot more...
Make it so. 

This week on the Solid State Podcast I… get to speak to you from the past. No, not in a Back to the Future kind of way… though that’d be pretty cool… instead its for the far more mundane reason that, when recording an episode “on the road” its important to remember two things… your recording equipment AND the source files for, you know, actually cutting together the show…
So, with that, here we are on a beautiful Florida morning on March 10th, where I come to you quote-unquote “live” to intro an episode… recorded in the mountains of north Georgia… on March 3rd… 
Anyway… This week on the Solid State Podcast, for real this time, we’re talking all-things-mobile! Samsung had their flagship Unpacked event, Mobile World Congress was in full swing, and Apple decided to carpet bomb the industry with day-after-day of announcements on everything from iPads to a “new” MacBook… 
Again due to the, umm, Timey-Whimey-ness of this episode, some of those items… weren’t exactly announced yet… but rest assured we have PLENTY more to say in upcoming episodes as these devices go from being announcements on a projector screen to actual, physical objects in our hands to study, review, and hopefully find a place for in our daily tech lives… 
With no further ado, Allons-y… 

Many times we come to this show, whether it sounds like it or not… relatively prepared. The topic is clear, the message has been more-or-less thought through, and the banter, well, nothing can stop that from meandering… 
Other weeks though, it’s just not that easy. Tech is funny because it honestly orbits around the gravity of several “big” moments throughout the year. CES, Unpacked, WWDC, etc. The in between parts… well that’s akin to good old fashioned exploring. Every so often you come across a major moment in the industry that seemingly came out of nowhere… but a lot of the time the big players are doing their thing, the smaller players are looking to disrupt them, and “we the user” are still just looking for our “smart” assistant to consistently turn the lights on and off while maintaining more than one cooking timer…
Well, if you can’t tell by the rambling the even found its way into the intro… welcome to an in-between-week! There’s no central story or focus because, honestly, the entire industry (and close behind it the rest of the world) is still grappling with our last topic… See remember that RAM shortage we talked about? Well just a week later it made its way into the non-tech headlines and the next thing you know stock markets are adjusting, news rooms are spinning up, and everyones now talking about… what we already talked about. 
All I’ll say is buckle up, this one really goes places…

When something get’s sufficiently commoditized… it almost reaches a point where you start thinking about that one “thing” as a single, cohesive object rather than the sum of its parts. For many, a car is a thing you sit inside of, press a button or two, and you’re suddenly being propelled down the highway to your eventual destination. For the petrolhead, though, that same car is a symphony of engineering… disparate parts sourced all over the globe coming together to turn fuel, electricity, or both into the sweet sensation of speed.
Much the same can be said for the gadgets, electronics, and (frankly) modern marvels that permeate our daily lives. Most don’t think about their dishwasher as a small computer managing cycles of water, soap, and heat to make one of the more mundane daily chores… disappear. Heck, the average person things about their iPhone as, well, an iPhone.. that is until they send it clattering along the driveway only to find the screen shattered and the literally thousands of internal components… well… exposed.
Those components, then, often become the unsung heroes. An iPod without a hard drive is just a paperweight. A TV without a backlight is a very hard to use eReader. And… well… pretty much anything in our modern world without RAM is, honestly, useless.
RAM, or Random Access Memory, is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of the tech puzzle… microwaves to spacecraft rely on it. So, when the world’s ready supply of this technological lifeblood is suddenly… “spoken for”… what does that do to your next laptop? I hate to say that’s when good old fashioned Economics kicks in and… you may not like the inevitable answer.
This story goes much deeper than the price tag of your next Nintendo Switch, mind you. So grab another cup of tea, this one gets interesting… 

Well… there’s no other way to say it… welcome to 2026 everyone! Yes I know, the more things change the more they stay the same and all that. Resolutions made and near-instantly broken. Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace flooded with all the… umm… “stuff” from last year that you need to get rid of to make room for all the… yeah… “stuff” that magically appeared over the holiday shopping season… and, as if that weren’t enough… it’s CES time once again!
That’s right, back to the desert, back to the endless rows of startups, established legends, and global phenomenons allequally trying to convince us that their widget is, in fact, the next big thing…
We’ve actually said for a couple CES’ in a row now that true “gadgets” continue to be on the rise… As the (entirely, at least) App-driven economy becomes even more commoditized, room continues to present itself for new, interesting ways to productize, package, and ship the latest, greatest way to do everything from scrambling eggs to exploring the outer reaches of space…
CES is all that and a bag of micro-chips this year, as much as any other. But, just underneath the surface, there’s also a different vibe just waiting to take the headline… With RAM-pocalypse in full swing, every brand you’ve ever heard of is pivoting prices, adjusting shipping timelines, and honestly re-assessing if certain offerings even make sense considering the environment…
With AI squarely to blame… it’s no less ironic that, at the core of far too many of the gadgets themselves is, well… AI!
Used to be, something was effectively vaporware until it shipped… now I have to wonder if it’s vaporware until it’s been shipped, delivered, and, well… proven to actually do anything?
Let’s see what we can find…

A new year somehow always presents a… certain type of friction. 
We’re tempted, all at once, to think back reflectively on our most recent past while at the same time told to be visionaries about our quickly-approaching future (and beyond)…
Well, you’ve likely been listening long enough to know there’s… not a whole lot of what we would call “visionary” happening here at the Solid State Podcast but hey, at least we have fun doing it? 
In all seriousness, the life that is tech is far more than a job, a hobby, or even a passion. It is an integral part of who we are, and this show is an expression of that.
So as we look back at 2025, ahead to 2026, and ask ourselves where we see all this going and… if it were up to us… how that trajectory might be a bit different… it should come as know surprise that we had (and still have)… umm, thoughts…
With that there’s no other way to say it… we did it again! Another year basically in the bag and a new one hangs there, just on the other side of the hill. 
If RAM prices are any indication it’s… not going to be a cheap yet. But, if nothing else, it’s going to be a lot of fun…
Let’s hit it. 

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… 

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…

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…