No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

1. 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 People will give you tons of outdated things if you ask nicely.

2. 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...

3. 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.

4. It's someting 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

5. 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.

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

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.

Reduce + Reuse + the feeling of being a part of a special club, its kind of lit.

We need way more of this.

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?

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 agree with all the other commenters.

On a personal take, I have two notes.

1. 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.

2. 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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

• 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’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 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.

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.