Solid State Podcast

Episode 56 - What’s in the box... Samsung’s 2023 foldables, watches, and tablets

Gadget season is upon us and that just makes me… happy…
We do this job for a whole lot of reasons, but one of them is the genuine love of an unopened box, fresh protective film on the screen, and a quiet evening of installing Day 1 updates, apps, and syncing data…
Sadly I’m not being the slightest bit sarcastic here! So when Samsung had their foldable-watch-tablet-car-washing machine Unpacked event a few weeks ago, I knew that several such nights of new-device-goodness was in my future…
Now that we’ve had a few short days of being hands-on with them though, we couldn’t help but hop back on the mics and take a first-impressions walk through what’s changed this year and, possibly just as importantly, what hasn't changed…
You’d be forgiven for seeing the vast majority of these releases as strictly iterative because… well… that’s exactly what they are…
But beneath the surface, and in a few cases right on it, there are some intentional and dare-I-say meaningful developments that may entice some to trade-in-and-trade-up or even be the final missing piece to attract a first time user…
Okay… lets dive in…

Episode 55 - The Cost of Working Remotely

Technology is really supposed to do a lot of things… make us more efficient, remind us to be healthier, solve our most complex problems… while at the same time being simple enough that an elementary school child can pick it up and somehow make me feel a million years old at Fortnite…
All these things, whether they’re successful or not carry some measure of tangible value because, frankly, we would have stopped using them by now without it!
But in one, genuinely key area technology hasn’t just evolved in recent years, its hit light speed… and that’s the gear, the software, and really the services that drive and enable remote work in the modern world… 
Listen, regardless of what any of these companies will happily tell you, none of this is revolutionary… we’ve had VPNs for decades, video calls since Skype, and sometimes I actually do miss when email was the only virtual pile of notifications I had to worry about triaging each day… but the ubiquity of it all, how the rabid hunger for these tools in almost every vertical and way of life… that's relatively new…
Certainly the Pandemic played a horrifying but pivotal role in that seemingly overnight explosion onto the stage of our “new normal”… but as companies globally are grappling with the NEW new normal… we got to wondering at a personal level, and a professional level, heck even as a human that just wants to get to work each day… what is the Cost of Working Remotely…

Episode 54 - Samsung’s Foldable Unpacked Event 2023

Let’s just get it out of the way… I tend to change phones… shall we say… about as often as most people get their hair cut…
So when I get to say my SIM card that is all but exclusively held for my “phone of the month” problem has been attached to the Samsung Galaxy Flip 4 that I literally purchased on this show last year… well honestly it might be a record!
The phone isn’t slow but it isn’t necessarily “fast” either… the build quality has every short coming that a modern foldable phone has and then some… and even when unfolded it’s still noticeably smaller than the iPhone that rides shotgun in my other pocket. 
So, why then, has this phone stood my version of a “test of time” where countless others have gotten their 30-or-so days of trial by combat followed by relegation to the dreaded desk drawer of waiting until something else comes along that it can be traded-in towards… 
The best answer I can come up with… and stay with me here… is that the Flip is actually different… it’s actually novel… dare I say every so often it’s… FUN!
If you haven’t pieced it together yet (or read the episode title) I am, in the usual round-about way, building up to Samsung’s foldable Unpacked event for 2023… No the Flip 5 wasn’t the only announcement, in fact there were several and each had their own unique way of standing out in sometimes-subtle but always meaningful ways… 
We’re going to do our best to hit them all, give a Birds Eye view of what’s coming in a couple short weeks when these devices hit store shelves, and set the stage for what MIGHT just be one heck-of-a “What’s in the box” episode to come…

Episode 53 - What’s next... for the Right to Repair?

Anyone who knows me personally is aware of a few things… I love my gadgets, I tend to talk too much, and I drop things… a lot 
I wouldn’t say I’m clumsy by nature, per se, I just only have one speed and that speed usually lends itself to very costly slabs of metal and glass being turned into temporary frisbees until gravity steps in and does what it does best…
Now, based on the number of quarter-inch thick cases I see on virtually every piece of consumer electronics “out in the wild” I get the impression I’m not alone. You get out of the car, and your phone takes a tumble. You plug in your laptop and that’s when the dog runs by and you really wish you had MagSafe. Or… not saying this has happened to me… but you’re 100% sure that shelf can support a TV because you definitely remembered the drywall anchors, right?
So what does all of this mayhem and potential destruction add up to? Devices that at best have some bumps and bruises from the journey, but often enough things do just break. And with the ever-growing importance they have in our daily lives, when they do break we want to fix them! 
The question coming more and more into focus both in the industry and frankly beyond is this then… when it comes time to fix it, who should be able to do it, how much should it cost, and (sadly) should it even be possible? Set down that screwdriver, secure your OtterBox Defender, and lets talk through what’s next for the Right to Repair…

Episode 52 - The thing about building a PC in 2023 is...

A lot can change in year… I mean heck, a lot can change in a minute… but in this case we’ll settle with the last twelve months or so…
Thinking back to early 2022, a certain illness was still commonly in the news, shipping containers were piled up at ports across the globe, and seemingly precious little of what was in those containers was making it to store shelves…
The impact of the supply chain on consumer goods had a stark impact that is surely still being felt now, but is it getting any better? 
We’re not even about to try and answer that question on a truly macro-economic scale, because if we did we’d have you all 3D printing your own car parts and hydroponically growing corn with AI by the end of the episode… but in the case of something we are at least a little more qualified to speak to, we chose to zoom in on all-things-tech… specifically our favorite pass time of PC building…
So with delivery trucks back on the road, the crypto-driven demand bubble bursting around the GPU industry, and just a little too much time on our hands these days… we’ll take a shot at answering what is the thing about building a PC in 2023…

Episode 51 - Failed Technology Brands... a History

The technology field, like any other business sector, is made up of… well… businesses…
Those businesses have their own brands, and they fight tooth-and-nail to protect them. Be it through Trademark, Copyright, or the ever-present threat of being turned into a verb… these brands are as valuable as the literal products and services they represent. 
But what happens… what it all goes wrong. When the lights finally go out, the doors are shut, and there’s no more business left to promote. Where, then, do brands go to die? 
Today we’re going to talk about a mere handful examples of former behemoths, hockey-stick startups, and even dot-com-bubble flashes in the pan that all have one very important thing in common… they don’t exist any more. 
Some fell to our good friend competition, others to poor or misguided leadership, and a couple, well… just weren’t good ideas in the first place…
Business, like life, has a lifecycle. A beginning and an end. Not only is it expected, it’s natural. 
So as we peruse the museum of logos that once adorned shelves both virtual and physical a few short years ago, we can’t help but wonder… who’s next? 

Episode 50 - What’s Next for Augmented and Virtual Reality

At first glance, the setting here in my office is much like any other morning… 
From the vantage point of my desk chair, I’m surrounded on all sides by various monitors, valued momentos, and a lone window to an outside world I admittedly spend too little time in… 
What makes today different from most, though, is no matter where I look there is a floating display just above and to the right of my eye line… showing me the time, temperature, and ever growing number of unread emails I need to get to… 
See, I happen to be wearing the first attempt at an Augmented Reality future by a multi-billion dollar behemoth of tech launch to international fanfare at their annual Developers Conference… it captured the headlines coast-to-coast and the imaginations of tech nerds and every-day-people alike… 
Now… before you get TOO excited… no, I’m not wearing Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro… in fact this device predates it by over a decade…
Google’s Glass might rank amongst the best examples of a technology that was just too far ahead of its time… Battery technology, Display capability, or the supporting smart devices themselves just weren’t “there yet” to create the critical mass needed for a consumer market success, or even the Enterprise-focused pivot they woefully attempted at the ninth hour…
So in today’s episode, we’re here to talk about what’s next for Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality by starting where (for many) it all began… and trying to figure out if Apple’s doomed to a growing list of false-starts or are they indeed on to something… Different…

Episode 49 - Apple WWDC 2023

One of the best parts about doing this show for over a year now is, every so often, we get to take a look back… to size things up in the past with a lense of the present…
When we covered Apples World Wide Developer Conference in 2022, it’s impossible to ignore that things just seemed… different
Maybe it was the Cupertino Spaceship still shaking off the Pandemic blues… or simply the year was a mid-way stop towards plans that just hadn’t “gotten there” yet… regardless the cause, we spent over an hour talking future offerings, hypotheticals, and maybe even a piece of two of vaporware...
But if that was the tone of WWDC 2022, then 2023 can only be described as “come and get it!”
The most-loved laptop in the world gains a bigger screen and a more aggressive price… that you can buy next week… 
Some of the most powerful desktops in their class picked up new processors and new bounds of expandability… that you can pre-order right now…
And every platform from iOS to your Apple Watch learned new tricks that you can try for yourself in Public Beta form as soon as next month… 
All that, and team-Apple wasn’t quite done yet… because even after two hours plus of break-neck announcements and infomercial goodness…
We still had time for One More Thing… 

Episode 48 - Xbox... a History

It’s certainly not unique to tech or gadgets… but I hear people say all the time “we’re not allowed to have favorites”…
Well, I hate to break it to you, but we all do… myself included. And when it comes to video game consoles, my favorite has been the same for a very long time. We’ve walked together down the path of the great history of Consoles over the last few months, and this week we’re book-ending it with a “last but certainly not least moment”… albeit one that comes at a very big and potentially course-altering time for the company and brand we’re covering today…
You see, when a little Redmond-based software company (and yes, I’m kidding) decided over twenty years ago to throw caution to the wind and not only enter the hardware space but to do so against the likes of Nintendo and Sony a lot of people said they were crazy, it would be short lived, and possibly even disastrous for them… 
Fast forward those twenty-or-so years and Microsoft’s Xbox sit’s firmly alongside Sony and Nintendo at the forefront of the gaming world… but as we mentioned earlier… that world is changing at a breakneck pace… 
Rampant consolidation, massive hardware shortages, and skyrocketing costs are just a few of the hurdles not just ahead and upon Microsoft and their peers this very moment…
So the question remains, will Microsoft find a health pack quickly enough to jump to the next level, or have their aspirations taken them to the ultimate boss battle under-equipped and woefully outmatched? 
Let’s find out…

Episode 47 - The Cost of Collaboration

Collaboration is important… like really important. At our infamous “day job” its even one of our core values… without it what we do every day, plainly, wouldn’t be possible…
So, when something is that important… is there a “wrong” way to do it? 
What happens when a team that used to share four walls and a roof suddenly find themselves spread across a city if not a continent? What used to be a simple knock on the door is now a seemingly ever-more-complex mind reading trick of finding the right moment to disrupt a co-worker without completely destroying their work flow…
You see, in short, even something so basic and so foundationally important can be done wrong… it does come at a cost… especially in the remote-heavy world we now find ourselves in…
Basic social queues can evaporate into the mist of a Slack channel, and what used to be simple team-building by exposure now requires an intentional formula of prompts, nudges, and sometimes outright forced interaction…
In this post-pandemic society then, how can we best use this magical technology to bridge the gap and strengthen bonds while being a globe apart… what is the Cost of Collaboration?