Solid State Podcast

Episode 28 - Black Friday 2022: The Real Deal(s) or Crazy Hype?

There’s no preamble to the fact that it’s Thanksgiving week in the United States, and while for many this conjures images of Turkey, stuffing, and post-dinner naps on the couch, for a huge number of us it also means that just a few short hours after that nap begins standing in endless lines for "Black Friday", one of the most important shopping days of the year… 
Or… is it? The above would have been debatable over the last couple of years, and almost a certainty 5 or more years before then… But here, in 2022, is Black Friday actually a fixed day or has it actually become so much more that it’s lost any tangible meaning? 
As with so many things, especially in tech, the answer likely lies somewhere in between. It’s impossible to argue that Black Friday exists as a “thing”, even as a brand unto itself… just ask the emails that have been steadily filling my Inbox since mid-July. But as a singular event where the mother-of-all-deals is likely to be found, we’re just not so sure…
In true Solid State fashion, lets take a verbal stroll through Black Friday as it was, as we feel it is today, and where it might be headed in the future…

Episode 27 - Parts Bin: The Worst Tech We Ever Bought (with our own money)

The Fall months, for many people, are synonymous with new gadgets to play with… whether it’s the TV you’ve been waiting to go on sale, or the excuse you needed to splurge on that perfect mechanical keyboard… the options are endless and the promise of a new toy being just over the horizon is fun!
But every so often, especially for your three (somewhat) lovable presenters, things just go a bit sideways…
The next revolutionary widget turns out to be a dud, months or even years of pouring over rumors and reviews still leads you down a path to transistor-based disappointment… We’ve all been there…
So as we ramp up for a holiday season full of blowout sales, new device launches, and ever-rising hopes & dreams, we take a look back this week on some of the times those dreams just didn’t pan out…

Episode 26 - The Thing about the road to Recovery (Hurricane Ian follow-up)

If you happen to have watched the news, live in Florida, or listen to this show… you probably heard we had a hurricane…
Not just any hurricane though, Ian will likely continue to change record books for years to come… and while that experience has also changed lives, businesses, and the literal face of our homes… lessons also abound from these situations. What to do differently, how to prepare, can we be better? 
Many of those lessons, especially for the crew here, had to do with our technology. What worked as intended? Did anything underperform or just not get the job done? Or, more hopefully, what were the game changers that may have even saved lives? 
These are the questions we have been asking of ourselves for weeks now, and as a team decided the only thing worse than not asking them would be not telling people the answers… because if, buried in those details, is the one thing that saves someone the next go around… well that’s just why we do this… 

Episode 25 - Our early PC gaming... a History

If being gadget and “tech” people describes who we are on this show (and let’s face it, it does)… then at the core of that identity is a common thread that runs all the way back to the beginning, even to childhood, for each of us. 
It led us to build our first PC, edit those first lines of code, and break FAR more things than we ever fixed on the road to somehow turning this passion for ones-and-zeroes into a life-long career. 
Yep, that common thread is gaming… it influences the gear we buy, the way we will many hours of downtime, and too much of the stuff littering my shelves, walls, and library. 
You’ll notice a dip in audio quality compared to other recent episodes, and that’s because we frankly recorded this months ago but decided the time needed to be right to release stores like these so near and dear to our hearts. So with the Holiday game release season in full-swing, what better time to step back and think fondly on our early titles, quests, and energy-drink-fueled weekends that led as all the way to where we are today… 
Game on, Solid State.

Episode 24 - What’s in the box... Canon EOS R6 cameras

It’s a pretty common topic in technology-circles these days to “what is a photo”…
With AI, computational photography, and just outright opinions being expressed creatively at the device level, the answer to that question has never been more up for grabs… 
But in this week’s episode, we’re getting way down beneath that question to the types of photos take far less often than the ones you’re endlessly scrolling past on Instagram…
Yep, I’m talking about photos taken on an actual, purpose-built, Camera… 
No, not the camera on your smartphone or the app on your Lock Screen, but the  dusty hunk of metal, glass, and plastic taking up space on your shelf assuming you’ve even owned one in the last decade..
So, in true Solid Station fashion, we set out to get hands-on with a couple rather exceptional examples of these f-stop laden gadgets to see what we might all be missing out on by relying too heavily on the camera you always have with you versus the one you should have brought all along… 

Episode 23 - Apple October iPad and AppleTV Announcements

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this show is about tech… more specifically the tech we love and the tech we don’t-so-much “get”… 
It’s not that we don’t understand the literal mechanics of it all, we’ve spent far too many sleepless nights ripping this stuff apart and kinda-sorta putting it back together again…
In those situations is the narrative around the tech and, more than likely, those selling it that has us at a loss…
This week Apple refreshed some literal tentpoles of their product set… both ends of the iPad spectrum that make up the overwhelming majority of the global tablet market, and the AppleTV hardware that is supposed to be the physical manifestation of their media-based aspirations….
So when products such as these are dropped with about as much fanfare as a new Blizzard flavor at Dairy Queen, that tends to get our attention. The question remains though, was there really nothing exciting to say, or is there an even more interesting story to be had in what wasn't…
Let’s find out…   

Episode 22 - Tech, Disaster Prep, and You (Hurricane Ian Special)

The thing about disasters, “natural” ones at least, is that more often than not you really don’t see them coming… an alarm may give you the edge of a few minutes lead, or surrounding conditions may create the gut feeling of “something’s not right”… but in the case of a hurricane, usually they’re a little too big to miss…
The setup for this week’s episode is exactly one of those situations… Hurricane Ian is swirling around quite literally as I speak, and when it turned our way several days ago we decided it was an opportunity to take a long, hard look at how technology has developed around exactly these types of impending disasters…
Solar “generators”, cloud-based backups, and this thing called “Business Continuity” as a whole are all on tap, but the underlying message we hope comes through it all is, no matter what’s going on be safe, be prepared, and at the end of the day just try to be a good human… 
And on that early bombshell, I’m going to go tighten my storm shutters and charge this laptop… 

Episode 21 - Apple’s ”Far Out” iPhone and Apple Watch Event

The other night, while preparing for this episode, I happened across one of those movies that, any time it’s on I have no choice but to watch the rest of it. We all have “those movies”, right? 
In this case, the movie in question was Apollo 13… After all, it has everything… drama, heroism, and rooms full of fellow nerds doing what they do best…
I happened to tune-in just in time for the scene where the crew of the so-far-undamaged Apollo 13 were broadcasting mid-mission back to Earth… only to have their families discover the major TV networks hadn’t even picked up the live broadcast…
You see, at this point in the story, Apollo 13’s mission had allegedly become, dare-they-say, “business as usual”…
In a very different set of stakes, some parallels can be drawn to this week’s show… seemingly every year around this time, a California-based gadget creator calls upon press, influencers, and loyal followers to see the latest metal and glass slab to adorn the pocks of countless millions in just a few weeks time… 
It represents the now-annual cycle of a production, logistics, and sales undertaking never before seen on on this planet… trillions of components, thousands of workers, and a globe encircled in deliveries. But for many, might we say it’s become “business as usual”?
You’ve no doubt guessed, we’re talking about Apple’s fall “Far Out” iPhone announcement event… where we were treated to a sort-of-new watch, a really new watch, and a phone with some dynamic takes on a few well-known ideas… 
Underneath the sheen of “we’ve been here before” though, something just a little bit different is in the air…

Episode 20 - What’s in the box... Samsung Flip 4

Sometimes… you just have a false start. For us here at Solid State, a false start looks like an episode starting with aggressively mediocre audio quality because one host forgets to hit the record button on the main feed… 
But when you’re a multi-Billion dollar international technology brand, a false start looks a bit different… 
More along the line of thousands of devices recalled, millions spent in re-engineering, and a brand supposedly left in tatters…
The thing is though, when the brand you’re talking about is SAMSUNG, they are both experienced and accomplished at rising to that challenge. 
With the storied launch of the original Galaxy Fold in 2019, that should have been where the story both began and ended. But here we are just three years later with the newly minted Galaxy Z Fold and Flip 4… 
Is this even a comeback anymore or are we actually approaching a power-move for dominance? Let’s go hands-on and find out what’s in the box....

Episode 19 - The thing about camera tech

On this show, it’s become something of a recurring theme that “gadgets” are so much bigger than just your smartphone or laptop…
In past episodes we’ve covered the tech around everything from headphones to vinyl records, and this week we keep that theme up with the true and honest gadget-tech around modern day cameras and broader photography…
It’s one to really take in if the genuine art behind the scene is of interest to you, and even if not I have to at least suggest listening very closely in the last 10-15 minutes… because you might just hear the sound of Eric and I buying the same camera “live” on-show with no pre planning and less than no permission… 
Why do I feel like we’re starting a bit of a trend here…