Just last week, OpenAI closed on a $157 billion funding round, almost doubling its valuation. As an AI-driven world emerges and technological consumerism reaches a fever pitch, consider the following reasons to keep older hardware and software in your life:

• Newer hardware is increasingly becoming less open and private. Intel's 3rd generation CPU processor (Ivy Bridge), which was released in 2012, is the last architecture to fully support open firmware like coreboot. Every CPU architecture from Intel since then requires binary blobs that obscure functionality and aren't completely auditable.
  
  
• Older hardware is still more than sufficient for most consumer needs. Multi-core and multi-threaded CPUs have been around since the early 2000s and, because of the additional complexity required to build multi-threaded software, most consumer application only utilize a single thread. Drew DeVault, a software developer and maintainer to popular open-source projects like sway and sourcehut published a short blog post in 2019 about why he uses old hardware and wrote "My 11-year-old laptop can compile the Linux kernel from scratch in 20 minutes, and it can play 1080p video in real-time. That’s all I need!"
  
  
• Using old hardware can make your interactions with technology more intentional. Albert Borgmann, a tech philosopher who passed away in 2023, argued that devices transform "things in their depth ... to shallow commodities, and our once profound and manifold engagement with the world is reduced to narrow points of contact in labor and consumption." (Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry, 1984, Ch 12). Deliberate use of functional, last-gen tech can help you think more deliberately about the role you want technology to play in your life.