There's a certain aesthetic to this though - the beater that survives. Often these things were expensive when new. Music gear, machine tools and well loved lap

There's a certain aesthetic to this though - the beater that survives. Often these things were expensive when new. Music gear, machine tools and well loved laptops are great for this. A 1960's car (survivorship bias!) has this quality in a way that cheap electronic crap tends not to. The connectors wear out. The battery dies. It just kaputs for no discernable reason and it's not economic to fix. You want stuff early in its lifecycle where the manufacturers accidentally over-engineer it because they're not confident about the lifespan yet - or that kind of "Toyota" stage in the lifecycle where they got making it good cheaply fully down. I reckon you'd have to go through a lot of cheap smart watches to find a proper "beater", and the whole function of the devices tend to fight against this with interface standard and apps that render them quickly obsolete.