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There's a lot of hardware enshittification, eg removing a lot of commonly used ports from laptops. Also I don't like the form factor of all these Macbook rip-offs.
I haven't noticed similar issues with desktop computing, but for laptops, I do prefer older laptops.
Also, so many older devices go to e-waste when they're perfectly usable. I like to salvage devices when other people don't want them anymore.
I'm not super into retro tech, but It's become clear how advancements in technology aren't strictly positive. The things that get taken away aren't obvious and they aren't advertised. Things like ad-free interfaces, fewer privacy concerns, faster loading times because it isn't running dozens of background requests, less UI friction from popups, modals, and elements shifting on the page, no barrages of notifications, no perverse incentives where the user is the product.
Retro tech isn't immune to any of those things, but it is refreshing when you return to one of these devices and discover it has features you didn't realize had been taken from you.
Older tech did stuff for us. Newer tech does stuff to us. If you think everything newer is better, I can understand that, but it probably means you are young and don’t know what tech used to be like. One small way people try to recapture those times is by opting out of all the latest apps and fuckery and using something simpler and retro. For example, the guy who writes the Game of Thrones books does it all on a DOS command line PC. It works for him and has no distractions. No one is going to hack it because it doesn’t have a network cable.
I have no idea why you want to make this about gender identity. Those parts of your question seem to challenge the name of the ~~sub~~ community.
We don't have subs here. This ain't reddit.
Thank you for the reminder.
I picked up an old amplifier from my parents, they bought it for their day's equivalent of 4-500 bucks to use with their LP player, which has since died.
It's a Scott from the 70s, made in the US, and it somehow now appreciated over inflation if you look at the sale prices on ebay and the like (~700€).
When setting it up i opened it to see if it needed cleaning out, and the insides were pristine, and clearly hand soldered.
The sound is clean as a whistle, it's compatible with RC cables, and has a standard European plug. Not only does it not need upgrading, it stands head and shoulders over what you can get today for the same price they bought it for.
Sometimes, products made before planned obsolescence were just better.
Why ask strangers on the internet with no context why your friends like something? Wouldn't your friends be both far more able to explain, because it's their thing and we don't know them, and far more interested in explaining, because it's their thing and people love talking about their passions?
If it does the job, why waste money on new one?
90% of what people do on computers can be done comfortably on 10 year old computers, performance wise. If a device hasn't fallen apart by now, you can assume that it's built to last, which isn't guaranteed with new computers, especially those that you can get at the same price.
i use an old mobile phone and put Lineage on it
it's light, fast, cheap, does everything .. bingo
By using an older piece of tech that does one thing, you make doing that thing an activity again. As in, it’s a conscious involvement to do that thing now, it’s not just an app or a side feature of some other device.
For instance, I got an iPod Nano a little while ago and just loaded it with the few hundred songs I care to listen to. I use a fraction of the space of the thing if I care to add more music, but now when I want to listen to music I have to use a specific device to do so. It makes it more of a conscious decision to listen to music and, to me, makes me enjoy it more.
It's fun to take what is considered essentially antiquated "trash" and make something of it, and it's a relatively cheap way to do computer tinkering, as old tech turns up in pawn shops or scrap yards
Particularly when it's an old Intel Mac that Apple obsoleted years ago, but which still runs Linux perfectly. Also, they're reasonably powerful and cost bugger all because the M-series Macs have blown them all out of the water.
That makes sense!!! I get it :)
Smartphones and tablets manufactured circa 2015 were powerful enough to run many apps and software, and not yet locked down as much as they are now. So there were a lot of custom ROMs and kernels being made for Android and jailbreaking tools for iDevices, allowing you to customize much much more than the manufacturer intended.
And it's just fun to make something that most people consider "obsolete" perform well, or well enough to be usable.
Not sure what role gender plays into that though.
Older tech can generally be more privacy respecting, a old VCR for example won't collect analytics on you.
Who needs a smart TV, when you can just use a 15 year old flat TV and plug it into a computer. Install Firefox and uBlock Origin to watch YouTube. It’s a real computer, which means you can watch pretty much anything with it.
If you’re into hardware tinkering, get a mini ATX (or ITX) board and a small flat case for it. Should look pretty much like a VCR box from the 90s.
If you want to make it quiet, you could use a passively cooled GPU with a HDMI output. Alternatively, get a AMD APU, and use the largest fan you can to cool it. Tweak the settings to run it as slow as possible. If that’s not an option, stick a few of those Noctua’s resistor cables between the board and the fan to force it to run slower.
You sure about that? 👀
Without any kind of internet connection, it's a pretty safe bet.
Cheap. Why spend the high prices of the latest stuff when you can salvage old things for little to nothing. People will give you tons of outdated things if you ask nicely.
Less wasteful. If you can keep old stuff going, you keep it out of a landfill. It also means less new production is needed. In other words...
Says fuck you to corporations. Right to repair is a thorn in the side of many greedy business models that push cheaply made products made to be tossed and replaced over and over without a lot of improvement between iterations.
It's something to tinker with. Some people just want plug and play, but others want to rig up some crazy setups and keep them going just to challenge themselves and get bragging rights
Vibes. Some people are into old school film cameras, or arcade cabinets, or classic cars, or retro fashion. Playing with relatively ancient technology is just another way of keeping the good parts of the past alive.
Reduce + Reuse + the feeling of being a part of a special club, its kind of lit.
We need way more of this.
You're very right. I just sell/recycle my old devices or give them to a friend.
To be fair tho, I am reusing an old computer for a Lemmy instance. Right now it's still updating stuff and I'm at the very beginning of the process but it should work soon!
Props, I don't mean to imply we all need to shoehorn old technology in everywhere, but there are definitely spaces for it, and I also believe knowing how to use these tools are a great skillset to have.
Yeah!!! I definitely agree!!
Please allow me to broaden the context. I used to be an avid motorcyclist. I had a 2000 BMW R1100, which I could service with a modest set of tools. A more modern BMW appears to be very hostile to home mechanics. Even the screws have a corporate head nowadays. Servicing a BMW has become very expensive, as it requires some extremely specialized mechanics (or so they say). My next motorcycle, if I ever buy one, will NOT be a BMW.
It fits in a trend: consumers are being kept from servicing, upgrading or otherwise extending the lifespan of their devices. Repair a smartphone? Good luck. Swap an SSD in your laptop. Tough, buddy. Want to set up your dishwasher. Sure, download the app, give your GPS coordinates and the birth date of your firstborn and you can set it up.
Swap an SSD in your laptop
Is that an apple thing? I'vd neve r run into such an issue, provided the hdd meets the required form factor. My 2023 laptop even came with an unused 2nd nvme slot.
BMW
The apple of the automotive world. I'm kinda shocked HD hasn't tried to follow suit. I was sure the "guy who never rode a motorcycle before but became CEO" was gonna see every custom modification as a lost sale and try DRM.
Is that an apple thing?
Sadly no. I have had several Lenovo's with the same thing, and my current Asus at work does not allow swapping memory or SSD either. My daily driver is a Tuxedo, which does allow all this.
The apple of the automotive world.
From what I hear from a BMW mechanic in the family, they are starting to become the Acer of the Automotive world, although they would have to compete with Volkswagen for that title.
I find a lot more "soul" in older electronics. So many devices today are a minimalist thing with a touchscreen (or worse, thing controlled by your phone), probably designed to force you into a subscription. At least consumerism from a few decades ago operated by innovating to make you want to buy a new product, rather than designing it to be a trap.
Going back to the "soul" bit: I recently bought a Bang and Olufsen Beosystem 2500 (look it up) for my office. It's a stereo from the very early 90s that cost thousands of dollars in its day. It sounds amazing, and has little touches that just make it cool. Like motorized glass doors that are motion activated, with warm accent lighting when the unit is on. The tape player didn't work when I bought it, but I was able to replace the belt and now my childhood Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego soundtrack tape is playable again! And with an Aux input, I can also use it for modern stuff too to take advantage of what we've gained in media playback since ~1991.
I can't think of a new thing since covid that seems any better than the stuff before. Im really not sure if your talking less than a decade old or 30 year old tech honestly.
Anywhere from Apple’s 2008-2016 era
yeah thats pretty old. honestly though i can get by with 16gig of ram and 720pm and ssd with any processor that would be on something that had that. Its only recently that I kinda want 32gig and maybe a bit more resolution.
Find me a new phone with dual front facing speakers and I'll give up my pixel 3.
Aside from what everyone else's already mentioned, there's the whole hassle of setting up a new device - debloating, tweaking the settings, etc. Why go through the pain of adjusting to a new device when the old one works just fine?
Yeah, and in many cases de-bloating is not enough, you have to de-enshittify new devices just so that you don't have AI crap monitoring every single thing you do in reporting it to your corporate overlords so they can sell that data to the highest bidder so that your every waking moment can be monetized.
Nothing I do is illegal or evil or wrong or dangerous. I'm a fine upstanding citizen.
I demand my right to personal privacy.
I agree with all the other commenters.
On a personal take, I have two notes.
it's an ideological stance and part of my consumer activism. With older tech, I mostly know what the hardware does, what the software does and I can expect nothing more or less than advertised. With today's technology, the Terms of Service are often written in a way that is hard for the end user to understand. Since the end user simply wishes to use their^[some malicious actors even go as far as to formulating their Terms of Service in a way that doesn't actually make you own what you have bought.] technology, a lot of people simply accept the terms without having understood them, which in turn forces them and their data to become the product they never agreed to become. A subscription to Netflix forces me to hand over some undefined information and I cannot rely on consistency in image quality. Setting up my own media player "forces" me to understand fully what it does, how it does it and I can expect consistency in regards to image quality.
older tech allows me to do one thing, and I feel like it has freed me of the dopamine addiction enducing toxic doomscrolling and consumerism that comes with multi purpose technologies.
For me at least it’s the simplicity. Not that I understand everything going on inside of it, but I could and knowledge is often times readily available.
Another point i could think of is that the feature set is often times more manageable, you are more in control of what it does or does not.
Depending on the age of the hardware it is likely to have more resources for documentation, be easier to physically modify, and often more examples of other people messing with it to use for inspiration. Then there is the affordability factor, where a lot of older tech can be found cheap or very free.
For example, old alarm clocks are easily opened with a screwdriver, simple enough to repair or modify, and there are often scanned user and tech manuals online. Plus they are common to find really cheap as people replace them with more modern disposable ones.
PCs are similar, I had fun monkeying around with an old 486 when I was gaming on a more modern AMD build because running Linux on something that couldn't handle modern windows was fun! Plus it was easier to know what was what and not worrying about breaking my primary rig meant tinkering and trying things out wasn't a worry.
Gender identity doesn't really play into it.
I feel like the gender identity aspect of it is probably, at least correlated with the fact that many people in society are still uncomfortable with non-binary people.
If you face even the tiniest little drop of aversion when you go out in public on a regular basis, it's going to decrease the amount of time you go out in public, and therefore you're going to look for more things that you can do in the privacy of your own home.
That correlates probably also causes a relatively high percentage of non-binary people to get involved with technology.
Why do I prefer wearing the clothes and shoes that I've already broken in and gotten used to instead of crisp new items just out of the store? Guess I'll never know
I’m a millennial in my 40s who is starting to get back into old tech from my late teens to early 20s. So far I have a Nintendo 2DS, New Nintendo 3DS, old cheap phone turned dedicated MP3 player/mobile video device, and a boombox that does CDs, aux, AMFM radio, and has Bluetooth capabilities. The boombox is newer, but still plays CDs. I like having dedicated devices that don’t do everything.
The old cheap phone is nice because I can load it with music or movies and it saves battery life when I stream on my phone. The DSs are because that is my favorite handheld system and there are a ton of games that you can get for cheap or free. The boombox is because I dragged out all of my old CDs, found a lot of good cheap ones at thrift stores.
I’m just tired of paying for all the streaming services and owning nothing. So I’m going backwards in time with my tech.
I guess it's a mix of
Nostalgia (when using devices dating back to one's youth/childhood)
Just liking old tech like some people like old trains, e.g. admiring the know-how needed (to create something like this even with the limited ressources of those days)
Having fun at futzing around with tech/electronics (aka. making/hardware-hacking) which can include liking to fix technical problems and creating something based on what others believed to be trash/unuseable
Again, I don't mean to sound ignorant or rude, I'm just curious. I know the answer varies with different people, but I still ask what may be YOUR reason so I can get multiple ranges of answers.
For myself, it's gaming consoles that I already own. Why go for the brand new when the things I already own not only still work - but have more functionality than they ever did before thanks to their respective modding scenes?
Hell, just in 2025 the Xbox 360 got it's first software exploit that works on all models - which was thought to be basically impossible outside of very limited scenarios like the King Kong Exploit...
Forget soldering, forget RGH and JTAG - you can now have an almost cold-boot modded 360 with just a USB and 30-60 minutes of your time (and that's not even counting the full cold-boot exploit teased by Grim Doomer on twitter).
If you've got the right console, you could be sitting on a goldmine of fun right now and never know it until you try.
Last year I bought 20 old iPod gen 5s marked as trash on eBay and kitbashed together 12 of them in perfect working condition. Slapped a new battery in 11 of them and sold them for a nice profit. I saved one for myself which I then modded with a large battery, a little 256GB M.2 SSD, replaced the tweeter with a taptic engine from an old iPhone, and installed Rockbox on it. Now it's connecting to my PC like a flash disk and I can copy-paste music to it without syncing with iTunes, and it supports FLAC. It changed my relationship with music, and it's a purpose-made device that takes no calls and has no interruptions. Unlike my phone, which I can pick up to change a song and check a notification, then dwelve into doomscrolling on IG.
I also bought a fully mechanical (no batteries) film camera made in '75 that really got me into photography. Yes, film is expensive, and I have to pay a lab to develop and print my photos, but they feel real. Before this, I would take photos with my phone that got lost in a sea of thousands of other images in my phone gallery and I wouldn't really appreciate them. My friends hate waiting sometimes up to a month to get the prints, but once they have them they really treasure those photos and memories.
Old tech was slow and clunky compared to today's smartphones which are able to do everything, but smartphones lack the physical and emotional connections that came with the old ways of doing things.
I agree with the general takes here, and can add one for specific situations. I have some very old keyboards, and frankly even my newer ones rely on designs that are over 40 years old. In this particular case, I find the old tech superior, because they simply feel nicer to type on, and that's what a keyboard is for.
I also have quite a few fountain pens, but whereas with a little effort the keyboards are as good or better than an average modern model, I'll admit there is a fussiness and mess with fountain pens you have to weigh against the nicer writing experience.
I had to look up AFAB (assigned female at birth) because I was trying to figure out what the F stood for...I was thinking it was "All F? Are Bastards", lmao
Anyway.
Others have answered the question well, but retro tech has always been interesting.
I think that these days, more people are interested in tech in general (it's unavoidable in our daily lives), and more people were interested in tech before, too. So there are people exposing younger people to older tech, and in some ways, the "disconnected" aspects of retro tech can resonate with younger people.
Often the newer thing that 'does more' loses some of the charm/vibe that the old thing had