Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod‪.‬ Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith

This week, Friend of the Show Adam Patrick Murray from PC World joins Will to share the ground truth about Computex. Freshly returned from Taipei, Adam is a Computex veteran, and told us what it's like to attend and cover the most important PC hardware trade show in the world.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

We're taking another close look at a product that broke out and redefined its entire category, this time the venerable IntelliMouse Explorer. These days it's hard to remember that it was Microsoft who banished the infernal ball and introduced the optical mouse to the mainstream, so we head back to 1999 and discuss what mice were like beforehand, how mechanical and optical sensors work, debate PS/2 versus USB, make an argument that the whole PC gaming accessory ecosystem owes its existence to this product, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference has come and gone again, and frankly there were enough interesting additions to the company's various OSs that we figured an episode was warranted even before we got to "Apple Intelligence." We do our best in this jumbo episode to round up everything from silly corporate stunts to a (finally, maybe) context-aware Siri, an intelligent way to deal with too many notifications, build-your-own emojis, better vitals on the watch, MacOS's long-overdue window-snapping, and too many other features to list.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Will just traded in the ol' Chevy Bolt for a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5, so it's time to run down all the pros and cons of this newer and more robust electric vehicle, and also check in on everything that's changed in the world of EVs in the three (!!) years since we did our Bolt episode. Listen on for our thoughts on everything from plug standards to the rapidly expanding charger network, how many driver assists are too many, the seemingly endless absurdities in automotive UX, and a bunch of other stuff.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Microsoft has announced some... controversial new AI-driven features coming to Windows 11, so we thought it was time to dissect the Copilot+ PC spec and particularly its Recall functionality, especially in light of the new Qualcomm ARM chips that are bringing more efficiency and more machine-learning compute power to the portable PC space. Is this stuff something you need? Is it something you should worry about? We do our best to answer these and other questions.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

It's another Q&A episode, and this month we get into a wide range of topics including our haul from the electronics flea market, our growing appreciation for SCART, Micro Center's rapidly expanding operations, the open-source automotive self-driving solution, a farewell to mini-USB, a quick Steam patching explainer, and more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod