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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 People will give you tons of outdated things if you ask nicely.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

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

We need way more of this.

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.

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 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^[1] 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.

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?

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.

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.