Solid State Podcast

Episode 68 - Parts Bin with the Steam Deck OLED and Meta Quest 3

Some sights are just not uncommon, and this time of year possibly the most common site is a small (or not so small) pile of cardboard boxes adorning the front step of about every house you walk by in any given neighborhood… 
Sometimes its purely pedestrian… I will publicly admit I have a recurring box of paper towels sent to said doorstep because, sadly, I can’t be bothered…
But, as I alluded to before, this time of year is just a little bit different… And no, I don’t even mean that several of the largest gift-exchanging holidays are among us… oh no… it’s the peak of gadget season! As each of those long-awaited announcements take place, we get to spend time agonizing over where we are going to place our bets… and by our bets I mean the hard-earned dollars the result in said cardboard boxes arriving! With new and interesting tech arriving on the scene near-daily this time of year, being somewhat picky becomes a matter of pure practicality! Sometimes we guess well, sometimes we guess very well, and other times… yeah, we don’t talk about those...
This go around, much like Indiana Jones in a room full of ornate cups, I feel we chose… wisely!
Two of the biggest gadgets of the season are here in the room today, each connected by the fact that they’re not a brand new category, offering, or obviously evolution in their space. No, these are second and third generation entries into a market quickly filling with competition and everyone else’s “next big thing”… 
So how do they stack up against both the market and their own predecessors? Let’s find out by charging up, powering on, updating… again… and hitting the digital road with the Steam Deck OLED and Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset…

Episode 67 - What’s next for Open AI (and the return of CEO Sam Altman)?

Some stories around tech are entirely too predictable because, well… there are humans involved and at the end of the day there’s just only so many ways for us to try and on-up each other. That said, when the story starts to involve a nonprofit, a holding company, a very much for-profit company, a multi-trillion dollar investor, and the whole thing revolve around the future of Artificial Intelligence… well… that’s a cocktail of Unpredictability that boggles the mind…
And shockingly, that’s exactly what we’ve gotten over the last 96 hours or-so as its relates to its former Board, current Board, former CEO, and current CEO that, oh by the way, happen to be the same person…
AI as a whole is obviously the story of the day, as can be seen in our last two weeks of topics alone… yet as visionary, industry changing, and quite possibly terrifying as the future of AI is, there are still humans at the core of its development. Humans and their own views on what’s right or wrong, good or evil, or heck just smart or stupid… 
The last few days have been a whirlwind, and not to cheat ahead but I genuinely believe this story is far from over, but regardless we’re going to dive in and at least start to unravel the players, the chess moves, and both the near and long-term implications of how this appears to be playing out…
Hold on tight, cause this is a bumpy one… 

Episode 66 - What’s next for the AI marketplace?

This week on the Solid State Podcast, the full band is back together and we’re here to pick back up on the ever-evolving conversation around AI and more specifically the marketplace that is beginning to take real shape around it. 
Ever since it burst onto the scene last fall, AI has continued to dominate the moment around products, services, and the companies that bring them to you. It seems that no member of Big Tech can take the stage without working in some aspect of their broader AI play… be it supercharging their existing virtual assistant, enabling users to literally create content out of thin air, or simply provide the tools to doze off in your weekly team meeting and have a convenient (albeit contextually incomplete) summary for when you wake up… 
The only inescapable fact is that these products aren’t going anywhere, but possibly even more important is the supporting cast of platforms, services, and infrastructure that are inevitably building up around “AI”… You see the average user doesn’t care (or want to care) that asking Chat GPT a question sets off a string of cloud-based events that spin up servers, transfer data, and in the end costs someone (or many someones) money… 
So while the public-facing version of this race is “who can make the most game-changing AI experience first”, the whole other side of that very same race is “who can create the best, most efficient infrastructure to enable it… and do so profitably”…
For better or worse, this moment is upon us, and in typical Solid-State-style we’re going to interrogate every angle and ask ourselves (and you) the question… if we’re finally “here” with AI, should we have come in the first place? 

Episode 65 - What is a Photo (Part 2) - Sony Alpha 9 III and its Global Image Sensor

This week on the Solid State Podcast, Eric and I go a bit rogue and record a whole episode… well, there’s no other way to say it… without Cody’s permission…
It’s the classic podcasting story… one presenter gets so excited about a bit of news and messages his co-presenter at an ungodly hour of the morning… and the next thing you know the cameras are rolling and the mics are plugged in, its time to record…
Now you might think, on the list of things that would result in such a last-minute “go live” it would be things like a surprise iPad announcement, a sudden video game drop, or the leak of tech’s “next big thing”… Well, try not to be too disappointed when I tell you, its none of those things… not even close… 
See, we’ve already done a recent installment in our ongoing “What is a Photo” series of topics, and when Sony announced a camera that is all but certainly going to tell a sizable portion of that story, we couldn’t resist! The camera itself is more than you’re likely ever going to want to spend, and is jam-packed with features you’d almost certainly never use… but the story is much bigger than one new SKU in Sony’s ever evolving lineup…
Camera tech, on the whole, has been on an upward trajectory of evolution in recent years, fueled largely by the advances in the Smartphone space that keeps putting ever-better glass right in people’s pockets on a daily basis. And that is where things get interesting… the entire “What is a Photo” moment is as much about “What are you taking a photo with” as just about anything else… not to mention what happens after the shutter is pressed and Google’s cloud gets a minute or two with your hard-earned frames…
This one takes same turns for sure, but honestly… did you show up here for anything less? 

Episode 64 - Apple’s ”Scary Fast” M3 MacBook Pro and iMac Event

We’ve talked several times on this very show about how valuable it is for some things to be a little bit predictable… its comfy, it feels safe, you tend to have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get. So when a company like Apple, who has been following the same announcement cadence more-or-less since dinosaurs were figuring out how to search with Spotlight, sends out invites to a wholly virtual event, one week in advance, for 8pm Prime Time on a Monday night… well comfy and “the same” just flew right out the window!
Now don’t get me wrong, we had a pretty good idea this event was coming and what we’d be treated to… a new processor or two and maybe a one-more-thing… but in one of the tightest 30 minutes of modern tech we ran through a whole new family of processors, updated laptops and desktops powered by them, and a wholesale re-shuffling of Apple’s computing lineup as a result… I almost forgot to switch back to Monday Night Football when it was done…
With no more preamble necessary, let’s spend some time talking not just about the products themselves, but also about what’s likely happening behind the scenes, the “why” behind such a seemingly uncharacteristic change in Apple’s announcement style, and what the could very well mean for such events in the future…
Maybe it’s a bit of leftover Halloween sugar high, but let’s go… 

Episode 63 - The Thing About Travel Tech

It’s not always overly obvious, but more often than not we do put a certain amount of planning into our episode topics… they vary greatly from recent big Tech events and device drops that we just couldn’t wait to get our hands on and tell you about all the way to deeper, long term formats like our favorite “The Cost of” series… but on the other end of the spectrum are those born out of an experience we didn’t plan to share, but became to hard to resist. 
This week is absolutely one of the latter, because following a pretty last-minute trip across the country I was struck by how much the tech that powers those trips has changed even just in recent years. The greatest hits are of course still there: A laptop, a smartphone, a game console... but the shape, size, and capability of these devices has leapt forward in a way that even surprised me when I slowed down long enough to think about it.
The connective tissue to so many of our other beloved topics was also too hard to resist… Is it safe to charge your phone at a public charging station or should I find a good old fashioned wall plug at the airport? The Public Wifi might seem faster, but my trusty hotspot and VPN are the combo for me. Is being able to connect with my office, team, and clients at a moments notice a miracle of technology or a curse of our remote culture? I could go on and on, and in many ways that’s exactly what we did. 
So pour another cup of coffee, minimize that Priceline page, and let’s talk all the things about Travel Tech…

Episode 62 - What is a Photo (Part 1) - Hands on with Nikon’s ZF

Hanging on the wall in the next room, in some cheap-ish frames that came from insert-big-box-store here, are a series of architectural photos of some of the great buildings around downtown Chicago… the edges are just a little pixelated if you look close enough, the colors are blown out in several places, and at best they follow the rule-of-almost-thirds… But I love them.
They’ve followed me through several apartments and houses through the years, and are typically one of the first things to go up because they’re a structural component of “home” to me. You see, these mediocre-at-best photos are mine. 
They originate from a particularly important journey to Chicago with my then-girlfriend-turned-fiancé (on that very trip), and were the result of the most basic “point and shoot” photography with my now-infamous iPhone 4 of the day. Some time later my (by that point) wife printed, framed, and gifted me those photos from our trip. They mean the world to me. 
If your wondering by this point why I’m filling air time with more-than-decade old photos from an ancient iPhone, its because that’s just how important these memorialized moments can be. 
So when Nikon releases a camera that, in no uncertain terms, is focused on nostalgia, manual photo manipulation, and the build quality of a Sherman tank… the very train of thought I describe above is obviously still important to some people out there!
Today we’re going to talk about pictures, photos, why they’re not necessarily the same thing, and the first in a likely long-line of evolving conversation on the tools we use to capture them. Literally hours on the heels of cracking open the box, let’s get hands on with Nikon’s brand new ZF DSLR…

Episode 61 - What’s in the box with Google’s Pixel 8 Pro

The concept of a “thing” being greater than the sum of its parts is one of those recurring topics on this show… mostly because it’s so true across the technology space. Gadgets, services, apps… you name it… sometimes the product that ends up in your hands is just… more that it otherwise should have been on paper…
This week we had the opportunity to get hands-on with Google’s recently announced Pixel 8 Pro… and the results were exactly that… the screen is better and brighter, the processor is faster and more efficient, and the Operating System has a fresh coat of paint and a slew of new features… All are fine, some are even good, but something else about this device is more than even all of that should add up to… 
Google’s journey through hardware has been… storied… From the days of Nexus phones and Google Glass all the way to today’s Pixel lineup of phones, foldables, and tablets there has always been something missing. It’s not always about quality, direction, or usefulness… it just constantly feels like Google isn’t “all in” on these efforts. And in a very real way, there’s a Samsung-sized reason that could be true…
So with that in mind, maybe just maybe things are starting to shift… a stepped-up Ad campaign, a very real moment happening around all-things-AI, and a promise of years and years of guaranteed upgrades might push the math in Google’s favor this year… or this is going to turn out to be just another reminder from Google to Samsung that yes, they still exist as more than a software vendor of theirs… 
Which is it going to be? Let’s find out…

Episode 60 - Microsoft’s 2023 Surface Event and iPhone 15 Pro Max Review

This week on Solid State, things are definitely a little more… laid back. You see, every so often, you just believe with all of your heart that a company is going to surprise you… that everything won’t be exactly the way the leaks, predictions, and outright guesses said they would… 
Other times though… well that’s just what happens and what-we-said-is-what-we-got!
With no more beating around the bush, Microsoft had an event to basically refresh some devices… we’d already seen… announce some services… we’d already used… and update us on their roadmap… while saying nothing at all. 
I don’t want to cast stones at Microsoft specifically, they’re hardly alone in the who’s who of major companies that just couldn’t pull the “big show” together… but on the heels of massive layoffs earlier in the year and the sudden departure of one of its best, brightest, and most renowned… things just might not be business-as-usual in Redmond these days. 
Now, that all hardly sounds like a good sales pitch for 45-or-so minutes of your listening attention, but don’t worry, it IS us after all! We dive deep on not just the “what” but the “WHY” with so much of Microsoft’s current moment. 
And, to sweeten things up, we round out the episode with our first hands-on time with none other than the iPhone 15 Pro Max…
So toggle that Action Button, because it’s time to go full yin-and-yang and talk Microsoft’s 2023 Surface Event AND Apple’s iPhone 15 debut… 

Episode 59 - Amazon’s 2023 Device Event

Let’s set the stage… you’re driving down the interstate (hmm… haven’t we been here before?)… and while attempting to make a pass in the left lane going a perfectly legal speed, you discover the source of all the slowness is a big semi truck, cruise set on 65, and emblazoned down the blue cargo bed in bold, white letters is “AMAZON”…
This is a familiar site to all of us because, well, it’s frankly how we get a lot of our stuff! For better or for worse, it’s a thing! So when Amazon shows up each fall with one of those semi trucks loaded down with nothing more than announcements for new products and services people tend to pay attention! 
This year was, put simply, no different and yet entirely different at the same time… Words like “Echo”, “Fire”, and “for kids” abounded, but right under the surface was a new sort of tension… All things Echo suddenly also mean all-things-Generative AI, and the normal lineup of every possible screen size of device was pared down to just a couple of (relatively) minor refreshes and spec bumps. 
This by itself isn’t necessary just an Amazon thing… we’ve talked very recently about how at first glance Apple’s own iPhone event was seemingly subdued, even calm. But Amazon is just in a different position… layoffs earlier in the year touched almost every division, including the ones responsible for these very devices. And while Echo is nearly ubiquitous across households, they partially accomplish that feat with bargain-basement prices and never-ending pack-ins…
So the question that remains, is this truly just a “slower year” for Amazon, or is there perhaps something more strategic happening just behind closed doors… Let’s find out…