Solid State Podcast

Hosted by John Joyce

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100

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Aug 2026

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About the show

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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August 24, 2026Episode 1491 hr 21 min

Episode 149 - We review the Google Pixel lineup (and prepare for Dragon Con...)

This week on the Solid State podcast, we… talk about phones. I mean there’s no beating around it, right? It’s Late summer knocking on fall, which means we’re getting down to the end of what Samsung, now Google, and soon Apple have in store for us to round out the gadget year of 2026. With Google’s recently completed Pixel announcement event, on the whole things were very, very status quo… Three main phones (in a few sizes) last year… three main phones (in the same sizes) this year. Remember the Pixel Watch 4? Watch out, now we’ve got the Pixel Watch 5? Oh and the Pixel Buds Pro 2? Actually… those are exactly the same, never mind. Year for year, it was about as incremental as it gets. Processor generation bumps across the board… check. Just enough chassis shape and size changes to require buying fresh cases and accessories across the lineup? Ohhhh yeah. Yearly improvement in overall resources and “horsepower”? We, umm… might have some bad news on that front. So what then, are we even doing here? As seems to be the case with just about every other gadget, announcement, and broader event this year (and likely the next few years to come) the real story lies just under the surface. How much RAM do we really need in a phone? I gather we’re about to find out. Is the new “passport” form factor of the Z Fold 8 and likely upcoming foldable iPhone fad or future? Also… remains to be seen. And beyond the hardware, there remains an entire layer of the story that is far more inextricably linked to the software itself on these devices. Which features will be “gated” to only the latest and greatest, versus those that will filter down through past generations of hardware to put it in the hands of a broader market? Gemini was everywhere, as you would expect, but at the same time is starting to feel more and more muted with every announcement. Is it possible the industry itself is finally coming to terms with the fact that AI makes a much better billboard at times than it does a meaningful feature in the hands of real world users? Prooooobably not… but there’s a change of sorts in the wind nonetheless. As usual, we’ve plunked down our (mostly) hard-earned cash so you, at least at first, don’t have to to start answering the question… is playing in the “new phone market” worth it in the middle of RAM-a-geddon? The jury, as they say, is still out…

August 12, 2026Episode 1481 hr 18 min

Episode 148 - The (True) Cost of AI

This week on the podcast we… well, we do our best. And no I don’t mean because we didn’t prepare a topic and “made it up as we went” (that never happens….), this go around I mean we did our best, honestly, to… stay positive. Truly, there is plenty of bad stuff going on in the world at any given time, it’s not the intent of this show to ever zoom in only on the negative. That whole “silver lining” thing? We really do believe in it. That said, it’s been a tough few weeks in tech, specifically in the realm of our favorite-least-favorite topic… AI. See it’s bad enough when just one of the worlds leading AI research labs has to fess up to nothing less than losing control of the robot… and for some reason we’re supposed to be relieved, even a little bit “grateful”… that it only went teeny-tiny “hulk mode” on a website you’ve likely never heard of. No no, this is all just bad, dress it up however you like. The Cylon got loose and there was nothing they could do about it for a hot minute. But see, once that story hit airwaves well… there’s this funny phenomenon in AI circles that they simply cannot let themselves be outdone… at anything… even, believe it or not… “bad press”… So in now-typical “pay attention to what’s going on with this hand, not with that one over there” fashion, a second world-leading AI research lab then owned up to a similar “AI jailbreak” of sorts… over three months ago… Promises to do better? Government regulation? Honest discourse and hard conversations? No single one of these is or will be enough… we need it all and then some. The biggest issue is, we’re already late to the conversation and getting further behind every hour, much less every day. Remember that silver lining I mentioned? I sincerely promise it’s still out there, but we have to get to work finding it fast…

August 3, 2026Episode 1471 hr 22 min

Episode 147 - Samsung's got new Foldable's... (for real this time)

Sometimes a formula… just works. It was lore for many years that to sell more iPods, all Apple really needed to do was “change the color and the shape” every so often. Now in reality, those changes tended to run deeper… improvements in storage, battery, interface, etc were typically right behind that fresh coat of paint. In today’s smartphone-centric world, this strategy… hasn’t changed all that much. Sure go back far enough and every annual upgrade brought a potentially game changing feature… super high resolution displays, a front facing camera, heck… a camera you could reasonably USE… all of these were innovations fed to us one generation at a time over years of on stage events and world wide press releases. At this stage of product maturity, though, things don’t often “shake up” quite that much anymore. Remember last year’s “best camera ever put into s smartphone”? Well have WE got something in store for you… because this year is the BESTEST best camera ever put into a smartphone… Oh, and it comes in three new colors too. Sound… familiar? Well good news, everyone, because this year things are shaping to be… a little less familiar. Sure, what we’re about to talk about does eventually boil down to… a change in shape. But this isn’t “we took a tall narrow iPod and for some reason made it a tiny square iPod”… no this adds up to a change in overall shape, size, aspect ratio, build quality, material science… honestly, this might be the first truly “new” smartphone (in North America, at least) in a very long time… Oh, and one more thing… I’m not talking about a new iPhone. Nope, age-old rival Samsung has done it again, beating its Cupertino-based nemesis to the punch. It has to be said, of course, first does not always equal best. I have to admit though… I sure bought one. Let’s dive in…

July 21, 2026Episode 1461 hr 24 min

Episode 146 - The (actual) Cost of Today's Tech

Everyone has their guilty pleasure. An objectively awful TV show that you just happen to love. That candy bar that has your stomach turning an hour later but it doesn’t matter because it transports you back in time. Me? Mine is eggs. Yep, you heard me right, and I no I don’t mean some secret code word for an obscure, unheard of super computer or gaming platform. I literally mean… the breakfast food. Scrambled specifically. No matter what came at me that day, what has be stressed out or down in the dumps, the act of making and enjoying (probably too many) scrambled eggs made “only the way I make them” is pure joy to me. So, with that far-too-detailed peek into my psyche… you can only imagine the impact on my personal and mental wellbeing each time eggs became somehow more expensive than the literal truck that delivered them. Bird flus, infrastructure meltdowns… the cost of the freaking cartons. You name it, and it’s screwed with the cost of my most beloved snack a time-or-ten in the last few years. So where the heck am I going with this? Well, see pricing is kind of a weird thing, yes? When the cost of a dozen eggs regularly crested 5, 6 dollars or more… well you would have thought the world was coming to an end. That is until I compared it to… well… every freaking other thing in the world that seemed to be having the same or similar issue. Eggs weren’t expensive. Everything was. Shift quickly over to tech and well, that’s basically the only story in town right now. Six-year-old game consoles? Hundreds more than their launch price. Want a high-performance laptop? Hope you have equity in your house to tap. Simply want to upgrade an existing piece of tech you already own? Be prepared for 400% increases from just 12 months ago. Seems apocalyptic, right? Feels that way for sure… but then, much like with my favorite snack, we have to look at some perspective. Buckle up, because this one’s going all the way back to 1984 to answer the question… how expensive has our tech really gotten? Check please…

July 8, 2026Episode 1451 hr 28 min

Episode 145 - Did COVID kill gaming? (Oh, and we bought a Steam Machine...)

This week on the Solid State Podcast things get a little… real. We know we talk about a lot of topics on this show, many of them relevant, timely technology stories and others… not so much. This week, it couldn’t get more relevant. It couldn’t be more timely. And it honestly couldn’t… suck much more either. See, one of our favorite corners of the industry, Gaming, is now long past a “state of flux”. You could be forgiven for describing more as in a state of free fall. That’s not to say money isn’t being made… have you seen Nintendo’s Balance Sheet lately? But not all is well in the digital village, and the stakes are getting higher almost daily for some of gamings biggest names. Studio upheavals, large scale layoffs, and fundamental near-tectonic shifts in how we buy, possess, and quote-unquote “own” our literal games are all changing in faster-than-real-time with genuinely no end in sight. Prices continue to shift in a direction only “positive” for the chip makers themselves, and at the end of the day this has not-so-quietly graduated form nuisance, to concern, to existential threat to the state of the game. Call me crazy, but picking up the physical cartridge of Goldeneye sitting next to me and slotting it satisfyingly into a Nintendo 64 has never felt more like comfort food than now. As always, we hunt for the silver linings on this show. Let’s see where this one is hiding…

June 22, 2026Episode 1441 hr 30 min

Episode 144 - The one where John buys a Commodore 64...

This week on the Solid State Podcast we… take a bit of a breather. No, not from talking far too quickly. That would be inconceivable. It’s just that we get the feeling sometimes that that world gets entirely too serious around us (because it is), and in this crazy land-of-tech we employ ourselves in… we need to have some room for fun too… We couldn’t think of any better way than a good old fashioned palette cleanser… no big meaty topic. No world altering paradigm shifts. And okay, maybe just one soap box opportunity for me to rail on Social Media and all that it’s, umm, “done” for us. Everything from next-gen smart glasses to Commodore 64’s and flip phones are on deck for this one. I even return to form and buy crap on the show I definitely don’t need, desperately want, and am not compulsively refreshing a shipping status screen until I receive. This is Solid State… are you all that surprised?

June 17, 2026Episode 1431 hr 17 min

Episode 143 - We're using Siri AI... (Apple WWDC 2026 recap)

This week on the Solid State Podcast, we mix everyone’s “favorite” digital assistant with everyone’s… umm… “favorite” emerging technology and get… literally the best version of it we’ve seen yet? Genuinely dear listener, I’m as shocked as you are. My struggles with all-things-Siri through the years have been well documented on not one but two different podcasts for over a decade, and the hilarious part is, if you could dig up some of those ancient episodes you’d find the problems then were, well, basically identical to the problems that persist just a week ago. Say exactly the right thing, exactly the right way, in exactly the right tone and… “magic” would happen… Deviate from that proven path one percent, and somehow I turned on the porch lights at my moms house when all I wanted to do was set a freakin timer… But then, last week, at WWDC Apple did… exactly what we all expected them to do. AI, ahem, I mean “Apple Intelligence”… took the main stage in a very real way. Plugged into dear old Siri and you get… yep, you guessed it… Siri AI…… That part, again, wasn’t all that interesting. We’ve seen it coming for nearly a year. The Google / Gemini partnership was well documented. The things we needed it to do… already exist, yeah, on Gemini. No, where things really get interesting is… just days later as the phones and devices started cooling down from the somethings 30GB beta update… it all (okay, mostly)… works…… Does it death spiral and spin until a crash sometimes? Of course. Can it do my laundry for me? Not any better than Samsung’s million dollar robots can. Does Siri actually do a half-decent job of seeming to understand what I’m asking, what I need, and actually be able to “do the thing”? A shocking amount of the time… I’m not about to say it was “worth the wait”, the jury is still very much out on that one. But is a promise dating back nearly 15 years on the verge of being realized? Let’s find out…

June 8, 2026Episode 1421 hr 24 min

Episode 142 - Microsoft Build vs Apple WWDC 2026 (Oh, and go play Guild Wars)

Event Season in tech is one of my favorite times of year for oh so many reasons… not the least of which is that, you know, we have no shortage of things to talk about… (as if that’s ever been a problem around here) And then, even buried in the middle of said “Season”, there’s an even better overlap… a single week where one big conference has just happened and another one is just mere hours away. The sweet, sweet collision of what we “got” agains what we’re still hopeful to “get”. This, deal listener, is one of those weeks. You see Microsoft just wrapped up its annual Build conference, and for the first time in what feels like too many years it was… about building things. You know, Developers. The people around the globe that spend countless hours and risk their whole livelihood on the hope that their idea is the next one to take the market by storm. Microsoft (or any tech player) is nothing without them, and similarly we wouldn’t have, for example, Windows Developers if we didn’t have… Windows. You can argue eternally about which is of greater impact to the eventual end user or customer, but in the end… we need them both. And Microsoft took the stage this year and laid out its vision for what collaboration with said Developers is going to look like. Agents? Come and get ‘em. Linux tools in Windows? More and more by the year. Copilot anyone? That one was seemingly, umm, “absent” from the docket and that… might not be a bad thing. Oh, and Microsoft also announced the two most powerful (and most certainly expensive) Surface devices ever… no bid deal. Whew… when people say “that’s a tough act to follow”, it feels like they’re talking about this very event. But here we are, on none other than Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote day to say exactly that. The, uhh, RE-return of AI-empowered Siri, fresh coats of paint on every single one of Apple’s Operating Systems, and likewise a room full of very itchy developers who all have the same burning question… where do we go from here? With hours still to go, we stay planted firmly in “what if” territory for WWDC… but who knows… maybe we got a couple right? Let’s find out…

May 26, 2026Episode 1411 hr 22 min

Episode 141 - Google I/O 2026 (Oh, and go watch Star Wars)

Technology, by its very nature, is in a constant state of change. What was yesterday’s banner new product or feature sure to take the world by storm is today’s soon-forgotten commodity that we-the-user already take for granted. It’s the way of things. That said, every so often, the change is so big, so foundational, and so… irreversible… it hits just a little bit different. That level of change, while still very much in-progress, felt like the inescapable truth of Google I/O this year. Search, while still very much at the forefront, continues to evolve in front of our eyes from an answer-machine to an AI-driven buddy here to help you allegedly solve all the mysteries of the Universe. Shopping need no longer be confined to the four digital walls of a single online storefront, and instead span the very web itself with one Shopping Cart to rule them all. AI itself shouldn’t just be the tool of the tech-centric nerd, rather front and center to help grandma turn her hand-written recipe book into a vibe coded cooking app her whole family can enjoy… At least, this is what Google says (more loudly than ever), the moment is. Peer just underneath the surface though, and it’s so, so much bigger than even any of that. This isn’t a fight for market share, platform scale, or even Silicon Valley bragging rights. No, they would have you believe this is nothing more than a fight for survival. The survival of their companies, their mission, and perhaps even the human race itself. You know, because of shopping carts… Listen, I couldn’t agree more… something about this messaging is… out of whack The stakes seem misaligned with the message, and behind them the dollars seem misaligned with the payday. But, in the meantime, another I/O has come-and-gone… and with it, Google paints a future not of itself, but of its vision for the future of the web…

May 11, 2026Episode 1401 hr 18 min

Episode 140 - All I wanted was a Steam Controller...

This week on the Solid State Podcast, the only plan we could possibly be accused of having was… well none at all… See if you haven’t noticed, the world is in a bit of a… state of flux right now. Need some RAM? Good luck. Does your product ship by boat through… certain parts of the world? Not right now it’s probably not. Oh and remember “Kyle”, the one helpful person you finally found at AT&T customer service? He’s been replaced by an AI “assistant” that apparently doesn’t realize the word “agent” has numerous meanings and doesn’t seem to understand that I don’t want to trade in my phone for a bottle of phosphoric acid… So with everything seeming to change on the daily, where does that leave three podcasters other than to embrace the crazy and chart our course through… whatever the heck is going on. I try to but a Steam Controller… very unsuccessfully. We all try to understand the naming conventions behind the latest gadgets… somehow more unsuccessfully. Oh and Microsoft dropped the price of Game Pass and all we had to give up was Call of Duty? See, it wasn’t all bad! Developer conferences looming right around the corner, somehow all this activity feels like the storm before the… umm… slightly bigger storm? Buckle up everybody, turbulence ahead…