Why people still love retro technology like iPods and instant cameras

In May, Apple updated the iPod touch for the first time in four years. Vinyl record sales have averaged $ 400 million over the last four years, according to data from the Statista data tracker. Sales of DVD players have tended to decline, but they still reach four million units sold each quarter, even in 2018.

Other gadgets that have stayed the course: camcorders, radios, clock radios, landline phones and digital recorders. Millions of them are still used in US households in 2017, according to Statista.

Older gadgets have a lot of resistance because they allow users to disconnect from the constant ping of smartphones and tablets.

"There is a growing number of people who want to be disconnected but still have access to what they want," said Ryan Reith, vice president of the mobile device program at International Data Corporation. "This fills a gap in the market."

"Brands are starting to build a young consumer base and end up transforming them, as they get older, into more expensive products that the company could also manufacture," he said.

Instant cameras with film are also popular among teens. Fujifilm, which makes Polaroid cameras with an instant film, said its sales were stable. During its fiscal year ending in March, more than 10 million cameras and printers for smartphones have been sold worldwide. Fujifilm claims to be able to cross the boundaries of generations by attracting photographers to the digital age.

Nostalgia also plays an important role in the popularity of old technology. This can give people that comforting feeling of their childhood or remind them of a specific time and place.

"The pace of business selling new devices and pushing old technologies to obsolescence means that some devices are associated with certain periods of history," said Michael Connor, artistic director of Rhizome, an organization that Digital art.

Vintage gadgets can help people enjoy the technology while allowing them to feel connected to the real world. Smartphones often have the opposite effect.

That's why people are still buying alarm clocks and calculators, even if a smartphone has all these features.

"The smartphone is a bit of a Swiss army knife, but it is not necessarily specialized," Gagnon said.

Some people will find it easy to use the phone to replace all these older gadgets, he said. But "many people do not have a smartphone, or use these functions, it's not easy, for these people, existing products will always exist."

And some people like the art of older gadgets. People are looking for physical objects, but they want "a filtered and idealized version" of these objects, said Amanda Brennan, Tumblr's "librarian of the same" and responsible for content analysis and social networks.

"Polaroids often look fuzzy, the sound quality of vinyl is not comparable to an MP3 file or an audio file, but it gives them a more vivid and realistic feel", a- she declared.

Older products have unique experiences. Connor, the art director, describes the different aspect of a pixel on an old cathode ray tube monitor compared to a modern screen. On a CRT monitor, a pixel has a "low-resolution soft quality" that can be appealing from an artistic point of view, Connor said.