What’s an outdated piece of tech you still use and love?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?
My 90s bike.
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 😄
So much about it is “outdated”, but I love the hell out of it.
EDIT: Photo of my metal steed in "winter mode". LOL
Old ass kindle. Physical buttons, no modem to phone home / update itself / delete my shit, only thing it can do is display books
Still rocking my kindle keyboard. Great little device, however I would love a backlit screen and usb c port for charging now. I’d actually like it to be a bit more multipurpose for reading and annotating pdfs (I read quite a bit of spec sheets for work) so I am looking at remarkable/boox but only if my company allows me to expense it.
Yeah for comics I have a boox and also love it, definitely worth it if you can get your company to pay
Same and I got it second hand too, it is really convenient and works great with calibre.
I think my Paperwhite is the first one without buttons
Doorknobs.
Yuck.
Wheels.
I'm still rocking a Zune and a flip phone.
It's called a Zune. It's what everybody's listening to on Earth nowadays. It's got three hundred songs on it.
I know Spotify isn't for everyone, but they have a playlist call Star-Lord's Zune that is pretty fun.
I still use my Zune HD for tunes in the helmet whenever I go skiing. 15 years old and still rockin'.
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
Did you clean it like this guy cleaned a junk Gameboy Color? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BmGMi0IEx4
that was waaay too enjoyable a watch. thanks!
Rackmount Pioneer timer system from the 70s, rocks. 1981 Sony EQ integrated, rocks. 80s Pioneer single tape deck, not installed. Yet.
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:
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.
I'm hurt that you have no Atari.
No, wait, I'm hurt that you said some are older than you and you have nothing from before I was 14 or so.
No, wait, I'm hurt because I'm old and my joints ache.
I am sorely lacking in Atari. I would've had one if my grandparents hadn't thrown out my dad's 2600 when they were cleaning out their attic.
I'm only a little older than Saturn and PlayStation (based on their Japanese release dates). I get what you mean though. It's definitely weird when you realize that there are adults that have never experienced the things that were integral aspects of your own childhood. I have cousins who've never used a VCR, meanwhile I still have the one our grandfather bought me in the late 90s.
You have a WonderSwan Color? That's so cool, I always wanted one.
It is a neat little machine. Mine's orange and I modded it with an IPS screen (because I've been spoiled by modern backlit screens). My main reason for buying it was for Klonoa.
I bought some pencils and paper last night. Gonna write something stuff down, while using my chair to sit at my desk, in this house.
So much old technology that I rely upon.
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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.
Do you still have that A3000T? There are people that can repair that...
Yes I still have it. Repair of the motherboard was attempted but failed. Then I sent pics to the premier repair guy overseas. He said it was too damaged to repair, unfortunately.
I'll probably part it out at some point but I haven't had the will to fully dismantle it yet.
just games? i miss apps like deluxe paint 4, octamed, brilliance!, audiomaster II, and of course the demo scene.
I did lots of stuff with them back in the day besides games! Rendered some space ship flybys in Imagine, made custom icons for everything on my workbench, ripped sounds and quotes from my favorite movies, even ran my own BBS for a couple years.
But whenever I turn it on these days it’s just playing a few games and listen to some MODs. It’s just a nostalgia machine now. 😁
Count me in for CRTs and old consoles.
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.
As a controller nerd, I think I may be in the market for some of those hot takes
Hah. Welcome, kink sharer, it is weird here.
Mostly my big hot take with leverless stuff is that I much prefer the WASD configuration using keyboard switches (like the Haute/Cosmox boards, which are my current leverless choice).
My brain should be friendly to the thumb-to-jump stuff, since I was a micro and PC gamer in the nineties and I'm no stranger to QAOP/Space platformers, but for some reason I just can't parse it in all-arcade-switch leverless devices. WASD just works better for me, especially outside of fighting games where jump is mapped to a face button anyway.
These days you can get more of these, and you can also find WASD keys and arcade face buttons (I have one of those from FightBox, which I do like, although be warned that the slim version uses keyboard switches for both sides). I think I'm still way in the minority here.
I guess it's also a hot take that leverless is my primary choice for all 2D games, not just fighting games. In fact, I've been going back to fight sticks for fighting games, but leverless is just so nice for 2D platformers, metroidvanias and retro console games.
analog watches, also analog odometers/ dashboard
piano, keyboard
dumb fridge, dumb washing machine, dumb can opener, dumb book, dumb eyeglasses, dumb shoes
i like dumb buttons, sliders, knobs and switches vs touch controls
Once I get myself a new Mac Mini, my 3-ish year old one will go to the TV and be our media center. I need to wait a few more years now.
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.
MiniDisc is probably the best designed format in terms of looks.
The discs still looks futuristic with the holographic effect and bright colors.
The size of the discs also contribute to making them a perfect prop for movies and TV shows, they are easily handled and can be integrated anywhere.
Same with a lot of the players and portable recorders.
I will never accept that MD was released 32 years ago, they can still represent contemporary society or a cool tech future.
I am sad that I never had an MD player despite growing up when they were released, I only got one or two used back in 2011-2016 to play around with, it was fun but ever since I was one of the first students with an MP3 player (a Creative Nomad MuVo 64mb) at my school back sometime in 2000-2003 I have been into solid state music players and quickly integrated them into my phone.
They were great back in the day too. I used to have to use a ps2 to write to it as it had the weird connection at the back, I forget what it was called.
I remember I had discs of Tupac , Nirvana and Linken Park. There was others but thats all that stands out.
I use to use it when skating and unlike a discman it never skipped. It eventually died when I forgot to take out expired batteries and they leaked all over it.
So reminder take your batteries out when not in use
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.
Extremely jealous - I'd love a pair of 1210s!
Dumb tv.
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.
iPod classic. The fact that a 2009 device with a mini hard drive still works after dropping the thing like 100 times shows the absolutely ridiculously over engineered build quality on those things.
Same here, but my battery started to go out and puff up so I replaced it for a bigger one, put 1tb of ssd storage, a USB-C charger, and bluetooth. Now I don't have to preload music from my +200gb library and I have room for a couple of movies :D
Indeed. We have central heat, and technically we're supposed to install one of those fireplace inserts for efficiency (California). But there's nothing better than a roaring fire, even if it sucks more heat out of the house than it puts in.
I'm replacing an oil boiler with a masonry stove. There is something about having a fire in a home that makes it so much more comfortable compared to a central heating system.
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!
Analog wrist watches. Seiko is my preferred brand and I have a few of them but my favorite is a Timex Indiglo from somewhere around 1989.
It was my grandpa's. It was the only watch he owned and probably cost $20 at the Walmart jewelry counter. The glowing dial still works 36 years later.
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.
Not sure if "Outdated", but I still uses microSD card slot on my Samsung A-Series phone. I might've gone for the S-Series if they had the sd card slot, so yea good job, Samsung, don't dare touching the sdcard slot on the A-Series, or I might just go for like a motorola, or HMD/Nokia or something.
I also have some ham radios and a shortwave radio in case of like government censorship or natural disaster or something (especially considering recent USA politics). I don't use them much, I just randomly scan the frequencies to see if theres anything.
I heard like emergency communications during the Philly plane crash recently, although, I couldn't decipher what they were saying, I just heard some "pieces" and "bodies" and "crater" but its all out of context and I didn't understand a thing. I also heard some people taking about mundane life things on GMRS, or saying they were getting ready to watch the Eagles game. Still have yet to find anything interesting. But I kinda just have radios because I like the idea of having stuff that still have a practical purpose if the internet and cell networks shut down. Like I'm not even "old", I was born after 2000, but still want to radios just to have them.
My modded new 3DS LL
I will never get rid of my modded N3DSXL (with clit-joystick replaced with a PSP joystick!), my modded PSP, or my modded Vita.
I should play New Leaf. I’ve never played it before and I hear it’s the best one.
My 2 HP printers from the early 2000s
Me too! My toner is $20 and lasts forever.
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
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.
i have a fully functional Kodak Brownie, 100 years old.. but it requires ancient 117 roll film.
GIFs
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.
It makes great coffee too!
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.)
IFYNYN
Usually things like this don't bother me this much, but this... Did you just mix up know/no inside of an acronym? It's one letter for both in an acronym
The mouse I use on this computer is from the mid-2000s. Just in the past week or so it's losing clicks. I will have to get a new one and I'm ruing it.
It's this one if anyone cares.
I actually stumbled upon this the other day. I might make a project out of it.
Thanks for sharing.
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.
My thinkpad x220. One of the best laptops ever made
I have this old PC I made back in 2014. It's an AMD build can't remember the processor, I use it as a multimedia pc hooked up to myain tv in the living room for watching movies shows and streaming, so the specs are low.
I recently updated to a AMD 5500 because the hardware was loosing support so it was time a for a whole new platform. I used the old case and video card from the 2014 build.
When I put the old video card into the new 5500 build I had a really hard time getting drivers for it for Linux Mint and I couldn't figure out why.
It took me a while but that card I swapped over was a freaking Nvidia 8400 from like 2007. That card worked for 18 mfing years!
Then it dawned on me. When I build that computer in 2014 I put that 8400 in there as a place holder until I would have gotten a more up to date card... I just forgot and it's been working diligently since then... I mean wow.
I still use CRTs on occasion.
I love my double edge razor.s.
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.
Old Casio watch. Works well on the same battery.
I have an old iPod I use when I go for walks or work.
I left my Casio poolside in autumn and found it in spring. It was fine and on time. I’m still using it.
Pebble Time Steel, Surface Pro 3, and Kindle Voyage
Pebble Time Steel
Does any of the smartphone integration still work? Like notifications or viewing txt messages?
Most stuff works as expected. Here's a guide from 9to5Google
I used my Pebbles off and on until about a year or two ago. Yes, using the Rebble firmware it connects to your phone and you have good notifications. I miss the interface and alarm functionality, but they don't have the ability to respond to push notifications from Google or OKTA.
All of it! The only things that don't work are some of the apps that relied on third party integrations
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).
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.
Does my PC with GTX 1660 count lol? No fancy ray tracing, no DLSS, no 4k, simple 1080p 60 fps gaming.
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.
There's a reason people still use "CD-quality audio" to describe high fidelity music playback, it's still the benchmark, and I feel like we are still trying to achieve it again after being lost in the woods of MP3 compression and Bluetooth earphones for the last 20 years.
This is a great idea & an elegant solution to using/playing the small mountain of CDs I have. Thanks for the idea 💡🥳🍻
Too much to list.
Stuff that was created to do something and does just that.
No fuss, no ads, no updates, no sudden change of terms, no phoning home.
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.
What modifications can be done on wii u? I have one and would like to use all games that i can get without paying i also have homebrew on it.
Original DS Lite.
I would pay hard money for someone to make essentially a 3DS successor PDA running Linux.
The potential is limitless.
Ayaneo made the Flip DS but besides being expensive apparently the battery life is a bit wanting- but at least these kinds of products are starting to be made!
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.
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
https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/onkyo/tx-910.shtml
45 watts per channel would be advertised as 180 watts combined, wouldn't it?
Sony PCM-M10 field recorder Olympia Travel Typewriter Olympus mju2 point and shoot camera
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
I'm deep into the keyboard rabbit hole, but my oldest (currently working) ones are a 1998 IBM Model M and a weird military keyboard from the mid-90s.
My favorite keyboard is a 1995 ish Leading Edge DC2214 I have, but its switches started going bad so I'm using the dell until I get around to repairing it. It's so nice though, it has alps white switches and n key rollover unlike the 2 key rollover the dell has in some places. It's also just such a nice shape and nice color.
My home server has been running on a i7 960 with an Intel motherboard for many many years now.
my second monitor says 2009 on the back. still use it. like it more than my main 2016 one which is itself about to turn a decade old.
My ten year old desktop.
Does my 1080Ti count?
Yes, as does my DDR3 RAM that keeps randomly crashing my PC every few days (can't upgrade RAM without replacing motherboard, CPU, case)
It does my brother in overkill at the time but somehow in retrospect completely worth it GPU.
Vinyl player.
I haven't used iPods for like 25 years now, but I always liked that you could instantaneously switch songs, and on modern streaming apps I sometimes need to wait for like a second, because it does god knows what in the meantime.
My two favorite classics Ade my GBA (tho its nodded now) and my Sony WM-EX631 cassette Walkman.
My iPhone mini.
Me, sweating as I look around my office.
I don't really know where to stop this list. I love old stuff.
Baskets and wheels.
A horse.
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.
My 2070gtx
Mines still chugging along in my nephews PC.
Define "outdated".
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.
A car without an internet connection.
Green/orange LCD screens, needle speed dials, just perfection.
My 1980 Honda XR500 is an absolute workhorse of a machine. Almost 47 years old (built 08/1979) and still effortlessly pulls wheelies on command. Very little wiring, and most of it is for the lighting to make it street legal.
An XR not an XL?
I guess my ~10 manual car with no backup cam counts lol
2004 F150 and 2002 Spyder here. I'll roll those until I can't.