Solid State Podcast

John Joyce

A weekly show from three hosts deep ”in the trenches of tech”, discussing the latest news, events, and cultural moments around the technology industry and the products, people, and services touching our daily lives.

  1. DEC 10

    Episode 131 - A look back at the Tech of 2025

    If you want a sneak peek of the future, you just have to take a close enough look at the past… Different versions of that overall premise have popped up throughout my life, and I have to say it’s one that I hold particularly dear and true. The lens of history is such a valuable tool, especially when trying to get a sense of where we’re going as a society, as a person, or, in this case, in tech in general… 2025 wasn’t what I would call a banner year… yes a lot “happened” but I wouldn’t call most of those things a disruption. Sure OpenAI and others would happily disagree with me, but I have to say I’m still setting kitchen timers these same way, continuing to answer my own emails, and the pile of dishes still needing done from dinner suggest nothing has changed there, either.  That said, though, plenty did still happen across 2025… well established, category-owning names have found themselves in a fresh fight for relevance, assumptions around what it is to be the “best” product in a category (even from a single lineup) were challenged, and once again I foolishly wandered into the Virtual Reality space to ask the question… is this something?  Yep, as we wrap up the year, in many ways it was a whirlwind yet in others it was… aggressively business as usual. Oddly enough… I have to wonder if I’ll feel the same way when looking back on 2025… a little further down the road? For now, I’ll leave that to the historians…

    1h 25m
  2. NOV 13

    Episode 130 - What does $1,000 (and less) get us on Black Friday 2025?

    The meaning of things can just… change with time. It’s inescapable, nostalgia is very much a thing, and it’s honestly a tired trope at this point too. That said… sometimes when a thing changes, people insist on acting like it hasn’t and that might just border on (or run right over) the edge of insincerity.  So with that in mind, it’s time for some real talk. In just a couple short weeks, tired from turkey and well… family… Black Friday will arrive for us all. See, once upon a time that meant one thing… consume as much caffeine as possible, pile into a car (or several of them), and proceed to wander aimlessly around the nearest Outlet mall hoping to score the latest season of Big Bang Theory for no less than $5 cheaper than any other day of the year. Or was that just me?  Could you save some money? Sure. Would emotions, relationships, and raw humanity be tested endlessly? All but certainly. Was it worth it? I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.  Now flash forward to more recent years and… let’s just face it… the thing has changed. Sure there’s still a day, sure there’s even still endless lines and supposed “door busters” to be had. But I can also confidently tell you that “Black Friday” started much closer to October 31st than November 28th and that’s… just the way things are.  So all the advertisements, emails, and circulars can tell you about an impending ONE-DAY-ONLY opportunity right around the corner… I’m here to tell you those and many other deals are here today, they were here two weeks ago, and they’ll all but certainly be around two weeks after.  And to put that theory to the test, we armed ourselves with a pile of Monopoly money and asked the only question that matters… what does several thousand dollars get you on Black Friday 2025? Check please…

    1h 33m
  3. OCT 23

    Episode 129 - OpenAI launched the Atlas browser... that's good, right?

    Sometimes it’s hard to remember a time before the internet, but I do remember shelves in my bedroom growing up dedicated to an Encyclopedia collection. And then, some years later, I’d get another CD at our local bookstore guaranteeing several hours of access to America Online… and then once, well, online… I was certainly on the internet but that was a world without Google. Years after that Google was a cornerstone of the internet but you were getting there in a window (not a tab) in Internet Explorer. Then, in possibly the final form of that era of the internet… you had broadband bandwidth, a Chrome browser, and the indexed power of the full internet through a Google search baked into every tab.  Why the mini history lesson of the Internet? Because, in the end, it took a browser to cement Google’s place atop the mountain of that era. So, as we sit here on the precipice of a brand new one… with LLM’s, AI powered agents, and Generative AI everywhere we turn… should it really surprise us that one of the names attached at the hip to this moment is suddenly very, very excited to be launching their very own web browser?  Yes, platforms like ChatGPT are changing our relationship not only with the internet but with technology itself. It may be riddled with issues, under delivered promises, and outright broken concepts (because it is), but the inescapable truth is there’s also no going back. But with massive swaths of our daily lives at work, at home, and many places in between still taking place in a browser tab… are we ready to cede it to the very ones charting the course of this next technological era?  George Lucas once said that Star Wars “rhymes”… it was an eloquent-ish way of saying it repeats itself… a lot. At this point I’m pretty sure tech does, too…

    1h 23m
  4. SEP 24

    Episode 126 - The Gadgets of Gadget Season 2025 (Hands-on... mostly)

    This show has a whole lot of… “whys” behind it… Education(ish) for sure, its just fun is a definite top three, but right atop the mountain for me, at least, is and continues to be our shared, mutual, and genuine love of these silly hunks of plastic, bundles of wires, and ever-charging batteries we simply call “gadgets”.  And there’s no better time of year to be a tried-and-true Gadget Head than Gadget Season, of course! After an entire year-to-date of announcements, developer conferences, thinly veiled teases, and giant quote-unquote “leaks”… this is the time when the devices get packed, the tracking numbers are issued, and the highly rendered version in the advertisement of whatever we spent our money on runs face-first into this harsh thing called reality.  Do we watch said tracking from shipment-to-delivery with the excitement of a child staring at the chimney on Christmas Eve? More than I’d like to admit. Will any of this year’s lineup of next-big-things change any our lives? Most certainly not. Are any of them even any good? Guess that’s why you’re here, now isn’t it?  With no further ado, we’re going to chat through some glasses that are here, some slightly more interesting glasses that… aren’t… as well as newly arrived earbuds, smartphones, and even watches from both this century and last… I promise, that one will make more sense in the wrap.  Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, we even have a tease of our own at the end of the show… what can I say, we couldn’t help ourselves? Guess you’ll have to listen and find out… and hey, no skipping!  Spoilers…

    1h 19m

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
10 Ratings

About

A weekly show from three hosts deep ”in the trenches of tech”, discussing the latest news, events, and cultural moments around the technology industry and the products, people, and services touching our daily lives.