Solid State Podcast

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?

Episode 46 - Google I/O 2023

Let’s just come right out and admit it… it’s been a weird few years in tech…
Pandemic-driven development cycles, evaporating supply chains, ever-moving targets around remote work… even the industry-wide layoffs of the last few months… It’s been a bumpy ride.
But the more things feel like they go off the rails, the more reassuring it is when something familiar, something “expected” occurs…
The COVID years saw our favorite moments in tech move to glorified infomercials, and with that went some of the magic of a live, on-stage announcement. But just as the world as a whole has been on a slow, steady march back to “the before times”, tech events have been returning to good-old-fashioned demos, glitches, and highly questionable event wifi…
Google I/O this year wasn’t its first back in the Amphitheater, but it sure felt like the first one where Google was “back” with a lineup of announcements across its verticals… hardware, services, emerging categories like AI… this one has it all.
Now, it obviously remains to be seen how many of these announcements translate into products that consumers actual use or, frankly, ever see a physical or virtual store shelf… But on the whole, while faced with a rapidly evolving frontier of AI and the looming specter of Antitrust, Google came out swinging, and if nothing else that just felt right
Pour a drink (because, like the event itself, this is a long one), and let’s see where Google I/O intends to take us one Bard query at a time…

Episode 45 - What’s Next... for Display Tech?

I’m probably about to date myself a little bit… but amongst my fondest early tech memories was shopping for my first computer. No, not the first computer I built or even the first computer in my house, but this one was going to be mine…
While standing in the “computer aisle” at a now-failed big box store, I vividly remember two things… the leap of faith it took to pony-up for a Pentium II processor when I knew full well the Pentium III was going to magically drop the day after the largest purchase of my life, and the advice the sales person gave me that has stuck with me to this day…
See, he saw me pouring over the specs of every single off-white tower they had, considering the RAM, clock speed, port selection, you name it. What he didn't see me do was pay any attention at all to the next aisle over, where they kept the monitors…
He kindly struck up a conversation (mostly because they’d seen me repeat this pattern every Friday after school for at least a month), and the advice he shared amounted to “don’t blow your whole budget on the PC itself… remember all the graphics in the world are useless if you don’t have anything to watch them on…”
From that one interaction, my near-obsession with resolution, refresh rates, and yes, brightness was born. I didn’t just want my programs to load as fast as possible, or my storage to be larger than I could ever use (and that’s never happened), I wanted to see the digital worlds in front of me come alive. 
Fast forward a "couple" decades and that equation has found its way into everything… TVs, smart phones, tablets, and yes… my trusty monitor. Now, let me bump up the brightness a bit and let’s talk some pixels…

Episode 44 - Parts Bin: What Matters for your Smart Home?

We’ve said it many, many times here on Solid State… some things are just supposed to… work…
Chief among them are basic functions like lighting, heating & cooling, or kitchen timers…
So who would have guessed that here in 2023, we’re knee-deep in yet another format war that has drawn battle lines around none other than your light switch? Okay… that’s over-simplifying even for us… but you have to admit it’s not far off!
Bulbs, switches, plugs, cameras… toasters… you name it! They’re all joining the “smart home revolution” and aim to bring the most modern of conveniences to the most antiquated of creature comforts… as long as you buy the “right one”. 
The biggest problem is the “right one” for you varies heavily for you, for me, or your next door neighbor you still haven’t managed to talk to… The space is growing by the minute with new brands, platforms, and approaches and most importantly this is a good thing if the devices can actually communicate with each other… 
A lot to ask for, I know, but this week we’re going to take stock of what’s running in our very own homes and ask the question Parts Bin style… What does Matter for your Smart Home?