What do you do with your superseded technology?

Recycling.

Keep them for posterity. Not intentionally mind you…

Stuff worth keeping is kept, the rest goes to e-recycling.

Trade them in, if I can. Apple has a decent trade-in program.

If not, recycle them.

This is somewhat why there is planned obsolescence in many designs. They are built to last a cycle that technology will push them out.

Mostly cluttering drawers. I’ve old PC fans, various cables, old coolers, old motherboards, old CPUs, old HDDs, old GPUs, random power adapters…

Some of it is still worth a bit of money, but I don’t have the motivation to sell any of it as it’s not really any life changing amount, and I’m not desperate for the cash.

As a software developer, I keep/collect laptops and mobile devices as test platforms, so I can test whether my programs work on them or not, etc.

They can also be used to for some things that are handy, such as taking pictures OF your current phone, or while you’re using your current device for something else, or when some annoying task requires or benefits from doing things on more than one device at once, or you want to have a multiplayer game party, etc.

I keep my last mobile phone just in case I need to put my new one in the shop for any reason. That way I always have 1 spare. Then when I replace the next time, I give the oldest one away to someone in need. People who can’t afford a phone at all are happy to even get a really old one!!! They aren’t near as picky about having all the bells & whistles as those who can just buy what they want. There are plenty of elderly in nursing homes who just want a phone to be able to keep in touch & maybe hold on to a few pics.

I keep old charging cables in a storage box sitting on a shelf. They seem to come in handy at the strangest times. I’ve never thrown one away that I didn’t have a need for it a few days later. They don’t take up much room & the storage box is about the size of a shoe box & can hold hundreds of them.

I have one or two old phones. I think I’ve kept old chargers, because sometimes you never know if they’ll fit into something. The only time I’ve thrown away old chargers is when they are broken. Computers, I threw one in the garbage once. I figured it would end up either burned when the garbage was incinerated or in a landfill, so I wasn’t too worried about it.

My desktop computers went to eWaste. Old laptops are just spare computers now. I got a Kickstarter project for converting my old iPad2 into a digital photo frame.

I have a bin in my closet somewhere that has all sorts of old chargers, etc. I don’t know why, maybe I think there’s going to be some global apocalypse and the only thing that will work on equipment will be my old chargers, LOL!

Believe it or not, about a year ago I bought a new computer on Amazon that had an old version of Windows. It only cost about $100, and I won’t be using it to go online so I’m not really worried about speed, or getting bogged down by countless updates. But I bought it because I had any number of CD-ROMs that would no longer work on newer Windows. Some of those programs were really excellent and I didn’t want to give them up. And yes, I did try running them under a different option on my current computer.

Sometimes it’s good to keep old stuff. Years ago I had two different CDs with two different versions of Quicken. At the time, I used it a lot to do my monthly budget, although I never connected online or tied my bank account to it or anything. A couple months ago I went digging around for those CDs because I wanted to use it for a budget again and also figure out how to use it for some other things. Unfortunately, I must have lost them or given them away at some point, thinking I would never use them again. I thought to go online and just buy the latest version, but it turns out that you can no longer do so. In fact, it’s really hard to find the old versions for sale. Quicken now has this lovely scheme where you have to subscribe and pay so much a year. And it’s totally ridiculous that even just for a year, the subscription cost more than you would have paid for the CD.

I have a friend at my church who is really into biking with her husband. When she stops by the office, we get to talking about various things and she tells me about how she keeps track of the distances they ride, notes on the ride that they might want to refer back to, just about anything you could think of. When I asked her if she used Excel to do all that, she said no, I use Quicken. I got excited and I asked her if she had the old CD versions and it turned out she did. She brought both of them in for me to borrow and one of them successfully installed on my fairly new computer. And I don’t even have to keep the CD in the drive so I was able to return them to her. I’m really glad she kept those old versions!