Well for electronic components your basic three chioces for states of matter are solid, liquid, and gas.

Silicon crystals are naturally solid-state, car batteries and most can capacitors are liquid-state with their electrolyte, leaving many vacuum tubes no other choice but to be gaseous-state.

Now these air chips don't have any electrolyte so that rules out liquid, and all the components are solid materials so the component itself is actually solid-state, and so are other MEMS devices, even though they have moving parts.

Like an electric motor which is just iron, copper, and steel, a key solid-state electrical component.

It's still just a motorized fan.

> "Well for electronic components your basic three chioces [sic] for states of matter are solid, liquid, and gas."*

Three states of matter is basically a fairy-tale we use as a first, easily understandable basic working model of matter. In reality there are so many states that Wikipedia has a dedicated page to list them: "List of states of matter" [1]

This is also the reason why every physicist cringes when the usual popular science mags announce the discovery of "a fourth state of matter" about once every year.

> "Silicon crystals are naturally solid-state"

Solid room temperature silicon can be in a crystalline state or an amorphous state. While amorphous silicon may appear solid it has many properties of a liquid and thats where the word "liquid" in LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) comes from. So, its not that easy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter

There are probably transition states that are still to be identified.

I'm trying to narrow it down to the obvious choices ;)

Physicists are the experts on this kind of thing and I just go along with the choice they made when they started calling electronic components "solid-state" to begin with.

My apologies for being so controversial.

That sounds completely wrong? We don't consider hard drives or fans "solid state", even though they're not liquid or gas. The difference between what's considered "solid state" and what's not seems to mostly be in whether the component has major moving parts.

SSD means the data itself is stored on semiconductor (memory) chips, instead of a physical magnetic pattern on the mechanical recorder of a HDD.

Other than electrolytic capacitors, both peripherals are electrically solid-state.

Even the helium in some HDDs is for physical purposes, not as a gaseous electrical element.

"Solid state" in this context is used to include SSDs but exclude HDDs. The definition you use which considers HDDs "solid state" is not the definition that's relevant to this discussion. The physical state of matter doesn't determine whether a component is "solid state" in this context.