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.