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. قبل يومين

    Episode 138 - The thing about Wearables in 2026

    It’s honestly very funny to me how you can look at a gadget and think one particular way about it… have a stray thought… and then suddenly look at that same gadget in a VERY different light… Spoiler warning and all that jazz, but I recently had that exact experience with nothing other than my trusty, daily driver Apple Watch.  There’s no getting around it, the Apple Watch didn’t just define a category, it de facto created it. Yes I know, every Pebble owner and Moto 360 faithful (you know who you are) is clamoring for their keyboard to email me as I speak… but it simply can’t be ignored that like the iPad, the iPhone, and yes the venerable iPod before it, the Apple Watch made wearables the market it is today. Oh, and it continues to sit atop it.  So taking all of that and somehow… setting it aside… is it good for me? Apple says this device is a health and fitness forward piece of technology… designed to make your day easier, your Walled Garden journey more fruitful, and your heart beat ever-so-better… And honestly… all of that is true. The ways I’ve integrated it into my daily workflow have made it easier. The integration with the other Apple-driven services in my life are borderline flawless. And, as someone who went through a substantial health journey over the last five years… I don’t know if I would have gotten here without that watch. Oh, and possibly more important… those three colored rings…… And that's the thought I had the other day, the one that made me gaze at my wrist in an entirely different light for the first time in over a decade. My jeans are a different size today than if I hadn’t had that tool, there’s almost no doubt about that. But here, now, in 2026… am I an addict?  Well dear listener, in true Solid State fashion there’s only one way to find out… let’s dive in…

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  2. ١٧ مارس

    Episode 137 - Four Years (and one week) Anniversary Special

    This week on the Solid State Podcast… we’re another year older, certainly no wiser, and somehow just as not-on-time as ever…  Yep, you guessed it… on March 11, 2022 we dropped the very first full episode of the show… the runtimes were a shorter, the content was honestly a bit smarter, and my gadget collection… okay it was already out of control but its definitely gotten worse over those years…  So when our Anniversary date rolled around we sat down, prepped a show around it, and then I proceeded to get whatever the heck this “cold” is that seemingly everyone I know has lately and lets face it… you didn’t want to listen to whatever that would have been for an hour.  So, in the most on-brand way possible, we come to you Four Years and One Week into this whole things to deliver not just a walk down memory lane but also to connect the dots over those years and ask ourselves… how much has really changed?  Vinyl? Still flying off the shelves. Building a PC in 2026? Somehow more expensive than in 2022. Oh and the “Singularity”? I don’t know who’s idea it was to launch this show talking about a global-scale AI platform but… uh… yeah…… There’s nothing else to say other than, everything else aside… Thank You. Thank you for four years (okay, and a week) of laughs, bad puns, and tortured credit cards… and here’s to a heck-of-a-lot more... Make it so.

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  3. ١٣ فبراير

    Episode 135 - The News... Parts Bin Style

    Many times we come to this show, whether it sounds like it or not… relatively prepared. The topic is clear, the message has been more-or-less thought through, and the banter, well, nothing can stop that from meandering…  Other weeks though, it’s just not that easy. Tech is funny because it honestly orbits around the gravity of several “big” moments throughout the year. CES, Unpacked, WWDC, etc. The in between parts… well that’s akin to good old fashioned exploring. Every so often you come across a major moment in the industry that seemingly came out of nowhere… but a lot of the time the big players are doing their thing, the smaller players are looking to disrupt them, and “we the user” are still just looking for our “smart” assistant to consistently turn the lights on and off while maintaining more than one cooking timer… Well, if you can’t tell by the rambling the even found its way into the intro… welcome to an in-between-week! There’s no central story or focus because, honestly, the entire industry (and close behind it the rest of the world) is still grappling with our last topic… See remember that RAM shortage we talked about? Well just a week later it made its way into the non-tech headlines and the next thing you know stock markets are adjusting, news rooms are spinning up, and everyones now talking about… what we already talked about.  All I’ll say is buckle up, this one really goes places…

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  4. ٢٧ يناير

    Episode 134 - The thing about the RAM-pocalypse

    When something get’s sufficiently commoditized… it almost reaches a point where you start thinking about that one “thing” as a single, cohesive object rather than the sum of its parts. For many, a car is a thing you sit inside of, press a button or two, and you’re suddenly being propelled down the highway to your eventual destination. For the petrolhead, though, that same car is a symphony of engineering… disparate parts sourced all over the globe coming together to turn fuel, electricity, or both into the sweet sensation of speed. Much the same can be said for the gadgets, electronics, and (frankly) modern marvels that permeate our daily lives. Most don’t think about their dishwasher as a small computer managing cycles of water, soap, and heat to make one of the more mundane daily chores… disappear. Heck, the average person things about their iPhone as, well, an iPhone.. that is until they send it clattering along the driveway only to find the screen shattered and the literally thousands of internal components… well… exposed. Those components, then, often become the unsung heroes. An iPod without a hard drive is just a paperweight. A TV without a backlight is a very hard to use eReader. And… well… pretty much anything in our modern world without RAM is, honestly, useless. RAM, or Random Access Memory, is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of the tech puzzle… microwaves to spacecraft rely on it. So, when the world’s ready supply of this technological lifeblood is suddenly… “spoken for”… what does that do to your next laptop? I hate to say that’s when good old fashioned Economics kicks in and… you may not like the inevitable answer. This story goes much deeper than the price tag of your next Nintendo Switch, mind you. So grab another cup of tea, this one gets interesting…

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  5. ١٤ يناير

    Episode 133 - This year at CES 2026

    Well… there’s no other way to say it… welcome to 2026 everyone! Yes I know, the more things change the more they stay the same and all that. Resolutions made and near-instantly broken. Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace flooded with all the… umm… “stuff” from last year that you need to get rid of to make room for all the… yeah… “stuff” that magically appeared over the holiday shopping season… and, as if that weren’t enough… it’s CES time once again! That’s right, back to the desert, back to the endless rows of startups, established legends, and global phenomenons allequally trying to convince us that their widget is, in fact, the next big thing… We’ve actually said for a couple CES’ in a row now that true “gadgets” continue to be on the rise… As the (entirely, at least) App-driven economy becomes even more commoditized, room continues to present itself for new, interesting ways to productize, package, and ship the latest, greatest way to do everything from scrambling eggs to exploring the outer reaches of space… CES is all that and a bag of micro-chips this year, as much as any other. But, just underneath the surface, there’s also a different vibe just waiting to take the headline… With RAM-pocalypse in full swing, every brand you’ve ever heard of is pivoting prices, adjusting shipping timelines, and honestly re-assessing if certain offerings even make sense considering the environment… With AI squarely to blame… it’s no less ironic that, at the core of far too many of the gadgets themselves is, well… AI! Used to be, something was effectively vaporware until it shipped… now I have to wonder if it’s vaporware until it’s been shipped, delivered, and, well… proven to actually do anything? Let’s see what we can find…

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  6. ١٠‏/١٢‏/٢٠٢٥

    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…

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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.

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