What’s an outdated piece of tech you still use and love?
I know some people still swear by their old iPods or film cameras. For me it's a 15 year old Western Digital external HDD. Do you have any older gadgets or tech that you refuse to let go of?
Most of the components have certainly evolved when you look at a modern counterpart.
But it's still fully repairable, serviceable at home or on the trail, extremely reliable, and doesn't require any firmware updates or batteries to use 😄
Cantilever rim brakes.
Square tapered bottom bracket.
Cup and cone hub bearings.
External cables.
Friction shifters (may latest "upgrade"!)
Steel frame.
So much about it is “outdated”, but I love the hell out of it.
EDIT: Photo of my metal steed in "winter mode". LOL
I recently bought a Pioneer PD-F905 101 CD player. It’s 30 years old and I absolute love it. It needed a lot of cleaning (mostly nicotine and tar), but after that it worked like a charm again
I have a large collection of game consoles, with several being older than myself. Just to list the ones that are at least 20 years old:
NES
PC Engine (Core Grafx II)
Game Boy
Genesis (Model 2) + Sega CD (Model 2)
SNES
Game Gear
Saturn (Model 2)
PlayStation
Nintendo 64
Game Boy Pocket
Game Boy Color
Dreamcast
WonderSwan Color
PlayStation 2
Game Boy Advance
GameCube
Xbox
I also have some old A/V stuff, like a small collection of CD Walkmans and most of the pieces in my stereo system (the turntable is new, but everything else is pretty old). I buy a lot of old electronics from thrift stores because I really just love playing with them.
Still have the first computer I bought with my own money, and it still works. It's an Amiga 500 from 1991. I fire it up and play ancient games with it once in a while, on the ancient 1084s CRT monitor.
Also had one of the super rare A3000T's but unfortunately the battery corroded the motherboard while I had it stored away. I didn't even learn about that problem until researching what had gone wrong with my beautiful Amiga tower. C'est la vie. At least I was able to get an image of the 120MB SCSI hard drive, which I can boot up in an emulator and relive the glory days of 1993.
I still use two SL1210 turntables from Technics. They are from 1991 and still doing a great Job. My father-in-law bought them for his Nightclub he owned back in the days.
I still use magnetic tape media. VHS, Cassette, Video8, miniDV. the camcorders and players are not being made new any more that's for sure.
pretty much any physical media, such as DVDs and CDs could be considered outdated now too, love my Minidiscs.
I've made a point of keeping and finding real Televisions with Analogue/Digital tuner combos. having buttons work immediately when you press them wasn't something I ever thought would be engineered out.
Still play my Gamecube and still have basically every console from before it going back to the 2600.
I also used a Dualshock 4 specifically for a couple of fighting games until all the dumb micro USBs gave up the ghost. It just worked better than the DS5 for me for some reason just for this specific application.
Controllers are a place where I'm fairly odd and obsessive, in general. I still have fight sticks for the Mega Drive/Genesis and the PsOne. I firmly believe the chunky Sega Saturn controller with the handles is way superior to the bone controller that everybody keeps mimicking, unfortunately. The couple I still have in working order are deeply cherished. I have all sorts of weird, tiny modern controllers, and I still have a PS3 fightpad from the launch of Street Fighter IV. And don't get me started on my hot takes on leverless controllers.
I'm old, my hands hurt and I've gone down some rabbit holes.
1981 Yamaha turntable and receiver pair. Dad bought them new for my grandparents and I inherited the set when they passed. Fabulous sound and function!
Would love to use a MP3 player with wired earphones but the kinda decent ones are like $200 — which may not be much for some but it is for me and my third-world salary.
Tech that still works, I'll continue to use it till it dies. Then I'll try to revive it, and if I can't, then I'll upgrade. My main PC is over 10 years old.
home appliances!! I would never want anything with app and screen, just buttons and dials for me please + I like owning my own media so HDDs full of stuff I accumulated trughout years
Oil lamps. They have the same appeal that's behind the resurgent popularity of vinyl records. They're hefty, kinesthetic items that feel good in the hand. There's a little ritual that goes into using them. There's the sensory appeal. I bought a Thomas & Williams miner's lamp that was said to have been a prize that the original owner won in a regatta in the 1920's. It's all shiny brass, with a heavy, solid feel, and the parts fit together with such a satisfying precision. There's feeling the heat of the flame, and the slight scent of kerosene that it emits.
(Although, I'm not sure that they're outdated, since they're still manufactured and sold as yacht lamps, and you can still get parts. Last month, I ordered a brand new glass chimney for it.)
My E-61 espresso machine. The machine isn’t that old but the design dates back to 1961. Popping the cover for maintenance reminds me of working on an old car.
15 years is old? I have PCs running that are older than that.
I still have my Game Boy lying around here. I think last time I played was 2 years ago. That should be the oldest tech I still use. Apart from the cables in the house.
My fountain pen (and ballpoint too), paper notebook and print books: no login required, no tracking, no sub (and no constant need to upgrade to the newest version: some of my fountain pens are older than I'm (I'm 50+ ;)
My DVDs and CDs: no login required, no tracking, no sub.
I am famous for my love of my air fryer. Also, I had my main camera, a polaroid camera, gifted to me by my grandfather (who got it special from the higher-ups of Kodak back when I resided close to Rochester), and I don't ever see myself giving it up.
I don't actually use these much, but I love using them whenever I get a chance:
CRT monitors
iPod Classic
OG GameBoy
DSi XL
I actually had rockbox on the iPod but had to take it off because I'm more concerned with how it feels to use than the actual functionality; and rockbox kinda fucked it up.
Edit: I kinda unironically wish dial-up would come back, but as a novelty that ends up blowing up into an actual, community-driven internet. A) gives me fuzzy feelings for when I was a kid at my grandparents house before they ate the MAGA brainrot, and B) might force people to learn how to optimize their shitty websites or get left behind on the corpo-web.
My Sony PRS-T1 ebook reader. Still working fine and without rooting (I will updated its software before learning that rooting it required a prior version).
A stereo amplifier taken from a home sound system stack that was... Probably made the 80s? Or else made in the 90s with an already outdated style, IDK.
It's not name brand, it's dual stereo instead of surround sound, it doesn't have any labels about how many amps it can pump out, but as long as I'm in an apartment, it doesn't get turned up past halfway.
I like that it has multiple inputs, bass/mid/treble knobs, and that the thing just works.
Edited to remove a guess at how many amps it has
Edit, I looked up the model number and found a page of specs
It's an absolute battery hog, so I don't use it as often as I want to, but I got an old 90s Sony Discman some time last year. It came with some amazing 90s over the head in ear wited Sony headphones that works real good as well.
Just looked at the Discman and it was manufactured in '92 in Japan, model D-111, and I think it's real cool. I also checked the headphones and they're MDR-W08 in-ear headphones. Absolutely love both of them together, despite the fact the CD player is the biggest battery hog I've ever seen.
Hell, I got a CD for a game that came out a few years back and my Discman can handle it perfectly okay. I would have expected something to change in audio file formats that would have made this harder to do, so that is really cool K can play it so easily.
My modded 3ds + modded Wii U system
I have a very large library of games that I can run on both systems + I got a lot of controllers for local-couch sessions.
Few years ago I did a full rebuild of a top-of-the-line tube radio from 1958 and use it daily in my living room. My stereo tube amp is from 1963 or 1964. Both sound astonishing.
My binoculars are from WW II - era. I had to realign the prisms when I got them but the optics are about as good as you can get.
I also use an iPod Nano 2Gen almost daily, I think I bought it in 2008 and the original battery can still hold enough charge for 4-5 hours of continous play. Incredible device with a neat perfect UI. The physical jogwheel can be operated through pocket fabric, so I can switch songs or adjust volume while running without even having to remove the iPod
from my pocket.
Most of my peripherals honestly, my monitors are all 10-20 years old, my keyboard is a like 30 year old Dell AT101W, I only replaced my old Logitech G35 headphones when they literally fell to pieces
My 2005 Peugeot 206. Although it's always at risk of stalling during heavy rainfall. And my wired headphones that are reliable all the time even though they get stuck in weird places sometimes.
My main workstation desktop that I use for most of my heavy lifting was bought in 2016. In the years since, however, it's been maxed out on the RAM that the motherboard can support, the ssds, the video cards, etc... So while it's now hit that bottleneck of "can't upgrade anymore because it's at the limit of what the motherboard itself can handle", I don't consider it outdated because it can still comfortably do what I want it to do.
A close second would by my Lumix G7 mirrorless camera. Old, yes. But still works perfectly fine. Records in 4K and still produces a better result than smartphone cameras because it uses actual proper lenses rather than digital software trickery. With mirrorless and DSLRs, the lenses are far more important than the frame (to a certain extent), so I don't see a need to upgrade that anytime soon.
I have an old flatbed scanner that I occasionally use. I bought it in 2003 or 2004. For scanning I use an old 2010 Macbook Pro still running on MacOS X 10.6.8. The scanner software ist written for Power PC, and MacOS X is the last OS that can execute the software. The scanner still works perfectly fine. Some time ago I found out that there is third party software availiable that probably runs on recent macOS installations, but since I refuse to pay for it, I transfer the scanned documents with a thumb drive onto my M1 Macbook Pro. I tried to connect my recent Macbook Pro with my 2010 Macbook Pro via Bluetooth, but I couldn't get them to transfer files between them, although they detect each other in the Bluetooth settings. I suspect that it is a compatibility issue, as there is a huge age gap between both operating systems (∼ 15 years)
My LG V20. No current phone can replace the functionality of it. I'm dreading the day the apps I use for work stop working on it and I have to buy some POS modern phone and I can't do half the shit I currently do.