Even the hand-me-down situation has been changing. I remember in the 2010s being able to shop at Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale, which was a treasure trove of old en

Even the hand-me-down situation has been changing. I remember in the 2010s being able to shop at Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale, which was a treasure trove of old enterprise equipment, a heavenly place for a retrocomputing enthusiast like me. I even bought accessories for my NeXTstation there! The shop kept the good retro stuff in the back away from the general public for people who asked kindly about retro gear :). I saw some 1980s and 1990s classic Macs, too, in the restricted area. Unfortunately Weird Stuff is a thing of the past, though this had less to do with a reduced supply of surplus and more to do with Silicon Valley’s high real estate prices. Thankfully there are still good stuff to be found at e-waste recyclers, but if more companies are relying on the cloud, and if more devices are integrated boards with everything soldered on (such as most modern Apple hardware), the hand-me-downs of the future are going to be harder to work on than today’s hand-me-downs. I’m just an average software guy whose hardware experience is limited to a graduate-level computer architecture course and building PCs. I can talk about caching and branch prediction, but I’ve never picked up a soldering iron in my life; I’m no Louis Rossmann.