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.

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

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

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.

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.

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’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.

Cheap. Why spend the high prices of modern 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.

It’s someting to tinker with. Some people just want plug and play, but others want to rig up some crazy rigs 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.

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!

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.

• they are affordable (better to play with 10 different old devices than 1 new device, isn’t costly when you break it)
• usually more tinkerable (older devices tend to be more modular or easier to repair, only older iphones can be jailbroken, android custom rom scene is basically dead now, etc)
• fun to make old shits do near impossible stuff (like overclocking a pentium 4 for giggles)

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.

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

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.

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.

Reduce + Reuse

We need way more of this.

Often the newer thing that ‘does more’ loses some of the charm/vibe that the old thing had

Find me a new phone with dual front facing speakers and I’ll give up my pixel 3.

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.

Older tech can generally be more privacy respecting, a old VCR for example won’t collect analytics on you.

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.

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.

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?

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.

If it does the job, why waste money on new one?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unless it’s for gaming, I don’t upgrade anything for no reason. My parents maybe take that to the extreme with core2duo era laptops but they’re even worse with cut down Pentium D chips.

But all they use their laptops for is email and web browsing. So, still just fine. I did upgrade them from laptop hard drive to SSD a few years back and put Debian on there instead of Windows 11.