Junk Is The New Punk: Why We’re Falling Back In Love With Retro Tech
It’s 2025 and the latest mega-album has just been released – on cassette tape. Taylor Swift dropped Life of a Showgirl on digital, vinyl, and the old jewel-cased pencil spinners. They’re still with us, complete with tape tangling and endless rewinding to find that specific track you love.
But why?
Releases on cassette tape are becoming more common among some stars who are cashing in on a growing love of retro tech. We seem to clamor so much for old computers, consoles, cameras, and audio kit that companies are now issuing reboots of classic computers like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.
Last month, smart meter company Smart Energy GB surveyed 2,000 people in the UK to see what tech they missed. One in four people still hoarded cassette tapes and old MP3 players, it found, with one in five still hanging on to VHS tapes. TVs with Teletext also topped the list. A third of people still even actually use this stuff once in a while.
Luke Malpass, owner of retro tech business Retrosix, tapped into the retro zeitgeist by accident. A software engineer by trade, he got into fixing old computers as a hobby, and then began fixing up and respraying old Game Boy shells.
“I just chucked a shell on eBay, and they just went absolutely bonkers,” he says. He went from shells to buttons to improving the screen and the audio, then the battery. “I just ended up making what we now call a prestige Game Boy. It’s the original CPU and motherboard, but everything else is upgraded to be more modern.”
Now he’s building and modifying old systems and ships worldwide. He’ll sell you an Amiga 1200 built from scratch, or a Game Boy printed with your custom design.
There’s a sense of community about many of these mods, says Steve Vincent, who runs the VintNerd channel on YouTube. He points to the Fujinet, an open-source device that plugs into eight-bit systems and gives them modern capabilities, including a TCP/IP stack and Wi-Fi.
3D printing, online forums, and cheap single-board computers have enabled people to mod old tech in ways that were not possible before, he says. “If you’re an enthusiast and you have an itch to make something happen, you can make it happen now. You just get parts and hook it up.”
Malpass will relate. He runs a forum to advise anyone with a soldering iron how to mod old systems. Although he warns that he did it to create a safe space after seeing a lot of toxic gatekeeping in the community.
Why people love retro
Why bother breathing new life into old tech at all? For many, it’s a nostalgic pursuit. “It’s that call back to a more simple time and it’s attached to core memories in your life,” says Michele Diederich, a communications director who also runs a Vintage Computer Festival in Orange County, California.
Diederich still recalls the fun times she had with her C64, but it isn’t just older folks looking for the past that get involved in retro tech. Youngsters are also flocking to it. “We’re talking about 18 to 25 year-olds who weren’t there when Game Boys were about but who want everything to do with the game,” Malpass says. “They get this fixation to relive something that they have no nostalgia for.”
However, there’s also a danger of hipster elitism in some retro tech, warns Grafton Tanner, a US-based author who writes about nostalgia. The revival of vinyl records is a good example. “It wasn’t very long ago that I was a broke college kid that was collecting vinyl,” he says. “It often came with a digital download that was often as affordable, if not cheaper, than CDs at the time. Then it got really popular and really expensive and no longer accessible to younger people on a budget.”
When a retro trend gets big enough to mass produce, it can quickly sour. Adam Fuerst, co-owner of Retrospekt, a company that finds and refurbishes old instant film cameras, sees it in the retro camera business. “The Y2K digital cameras are so fun and they’re really enjoyable to use, but the prices are just skyrocketing, and it’s no longer a counterculture thing to do,” he says. “It’s becoming slowly more of a privilege, like you have money, and it’s a display, in some ways, of wealth and status.”
Fuerst tries to keep his tech business grounded by making used retro gear affordable and usable. His 40 employees refurbish old instant film cameras and other tech, selling some premium items to help support the business but mostly trying to keep margins lower. The team will break down the old kit, harvesting good components to rebuild functional units.
The hardest part is creating new cases to house the components. Many of the used cases are beyond repair, and Fuerst wants them remade in their original style, with sharper edges rather than the softer, curvy edges of modern cameras. Injection molding these is tough.
“It’s a challenge with our injection molders in the US to run these parts successfully time after time, especially in the low-volume high customization runs that we do,” he says. “We’re not doing it because it’s easy. We’re doing it because we love it.”
Bringing cameras back to life with new cases that are just like the originals is where Retrospekt found its core niche.
Built to last, easy to repair
It’s that call back to a more simple time and it’s attached to core memories in your life
Aside from the emotions it conjured up, one of the biggest draws of this older tech is its tank-like durability.
“We’ve got consoles from 1978 that are still going, like the Atari 2600s and even going back before that,” Malpass says. “You’d be amazed how long things last that were made in the 70s and 80s, versus a phone that you buy last year that’s dead in another year’s time.”
While capacitors might come and go, many other internal components are seemingly immortal, he adds. “Most of the old technology just dumped all its excess voltage as heat, so it was running at 70-80 degrees inside all day long. It’s done that for 30 years and not died,” he adds.
Alongside its durability, repairability is another advantage. Fuerst says that modern PCBs are often made by robots and heavily layered, making it impractical to repair those boards. Older boards are simpler. “Tech pre-mid 90s is really the sweet spot in which you have a lot of through hole circuitry that you can go and find components for,” he says.
Does the past have a future? Modding guarantees that retro tech will always stay current and relevant, says Malpass.
Others worry that modern technology is so bland and corporate that it might not have the same pull in future years that yesterday’s tech does today. When there are a thousand dull laptops to choose from, many made in the same factory and none with any real character, will people want to remember them in the same way they remember the Atari ST or the Apple II?
“I have an affinity for the current iPhone,” Diederich muses. “I don’t think I have an affinity for the one I had two years ago.”
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