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Comment by tgragnato | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to understand why some enjoy using old technologies. There is no longer a market for simple systems: nowadays everything must have super complex graphics, integrated analytical systems, and consume incredible resources.

Requirements, development, goal achievement is no longer a thing. Everything needs to use trendy tech, cool graphics. Main issue is that end-user productivity is lost.

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How about a much simpler and less loaded reason: because people always find vintage stuff appealing.

Vintage cars had been a thing long before cars became computers on wheels.

People collected and were fascinated with vintage commodity items of all sorts since forever.

This trend only goes to show that computers have become commodities.

Vintage cars might still have much of the same appeal because they have tended to become increasingly more complicated. Perhaps a stronger example would be antique books or furniture.

This is what I think. When a modern laptop or phone is old, except for a few avid collectors, it will be junk. An amiga has a completely different appeal and therefore becomes vintage.

But how do you know that? Who's to say that 35 years from now, someone won't have this exact same sentiment when comparing a (then vintage) iPhone 12 to whatever people will use in 30 years?

I agree, I love vintage cars because they're simple and impressive in an understandable way. I also prefer the feel, since it's more analog and connected to the road, and they often did more with less than modern cars, similar to how old computers were often more responsive with less. Cars need safety features and more complicated electronics, just like software needs security and telemetry/monetization now. And just like I'm impressed by modern CPUs and GPUs and SSDs and NNPs, I'm also impressed by modern turbo engines and things like skyactiv-x. I'd wager the reason people are always interested in vintage things is actually just that people are always interested in things. If we had access to future tech somehow, people would probably take interest in that as well

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