This puppy:
I even made a primitive task management/scheduler with Lotus Notes for it. I miss that guy; I had to give it up when I left that job.
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I only really came into the tech/PC space a few years ago, so my experience doesn’t go back too far. But I do really like old HEDT stuff, I used to main X58 and OCing on that is incredibly fun. Tweaking the X99 rig I have now is quite nice, but not quite as engaging, not as much of a balancing act.
I can agree with a bunch of the others though, I (now, I went through my RGB phase already) like hardware without excessive RGB. Although modern RGB isn’t terrible, they actually make the boards grey/black now so if you disable the RGB they’re clean af. Still prefer very simply laid out boards to the overbuilt ones most of the time though. My X99 Classy and some ASRock boards are very clean (ASUS WS boards as well).
As for other older stuff, I’d say I dislike the trend of laptops getting thinner and thinner. There should be thin and lights, but OEMs shouldn’t try to push all their laptops to be hella thin and skip on actual cooling. Mostly a beef with Apple though tbh, their older stuff was a lot better engineered IMO, especially thermally. Build quality on a 2019 MacBook Pro 13" (had one sitting around at work so I ran tests on it before a user came along for it) compared to my mid-2012 one is just as good, but the thermals are an oof. Both will hit up to 96C under repeated CB20 runs and neither throttles, BUT: My MBP does so at 2000-3000rpm on the fan and is inaudible until it hits the very highest rpm, then it makes a bit of noise. Whereas the 2019 slaps the fan up to 4000rpm+ and it’s very high pitched too, if you had to regularly use it under load it’d be quite annoying. Still hops up randomly too depending on the task at hand, even installing apps since it waits till the CPU is already quite hot before it ramps the fans up at all. Keyboard is objectively (reliability wise, feel is subjective) better on the mid-2012 as well, and I like the feel more too.
I am happy to see that phones are returning to a reasonable thickness (I’ve still seen people complain about the ROG phone though? It’s not even that thick) and even the new iPhones are putting in a bigger battery, though still RIP the headphone jack, I do miss it sometimes.
Someone I knew had a Hi-Fi system and played a recording of a live concert for me once. The sound was unbelievable, so much better than anything modern I’ve ever heard. Good call.
Physical switches, buttons and rotary dials/knobs!!!
my current car stereo / HVAC system is a clear illustration of why they are important.
Sure, carplay plus siri helps a bit, but needing to look at a non-tactile screen to hit touch screen buttons is way worse than using a physical button or knob.
Even the physical buttons on the head unit are all the damn same, along a strip at the bottom edge of it (Alpine ILX-702d - but it is same as most others out there).
Bring back tactile physical buttons and knobs! You can feel where they are, and get tactile response without needing to look at the damn things!
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Physical switches, buttons and rotary dials/knobs!
Saw this in one of those “handy gadgets for under $50” videos the other day and got very excited. 
iDrive on BMW cars may have been mocked back in the day but i’ve used it, and it uses a rotary knob to control on-screen stuff. It’s WAY better than Carplay or presumably android auto via touch screen.
Because it has a rotary wheel with clicky detents, that also acts as a joystick and depresses like a button. So you can feel what you’re doing with it.
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So true! Yea, I really miss hard drive lights on Apple laptops (since I’m using one right now) and the physical off switches that use to exist for Blutooth and WiFi, on laptops.
I also miss the physical shutter’s on laptop camera’s that never existed, lol :-).
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Arise.
I am the necromancer.
Hadn’t seen this one, just have to post in it, sorry dear mods.
I’m a fucking legacy myself by now, lol, so it’s only fitting.
-
My first typewriter.
And the reason that to this day, i write by hand when i have to, but use mechanical keyboards with blue cherries when the former’s impossible. Gotta hear it. Click click click.
Something from nothing.
Closest this species will ever get to magic. -
My first bobbin deck. Arriving together with a bunch of bobbins and a patient father giving me instructions.
(and politely making me understand that if i broke it he’d kill me)
Sound. Music. In love ever since.
I cannot describe it to you, except perhaps allow you to imagine a time where nothing was granted, not phones, not cars, not hobbies, least not hobbies that involved expensive hardware, not internet, not TV channels either barring the State maintained ones.
You maybe had a picture. Of what ‘something’ looked like; that’s it. Nothing to go by for you to envision it other than your imagination. And lest you were really well off, no one to ask for a peak. -
My first IBM (made in the US of A, down to the screws) hard drive.
It had a proper really thick carton box, that had a second really thick carton box inside, that had some polymer-based nasty smelling stuff for vibration protection, that had an amazing quality anti-static bag; that contained the actual drive.
Which was heavy enough to kill someone with and you never worrying about denting it.
And it made that wooonderful, wonderful noise!
(in between all that, there was also swearing and wishing their mothers serious anal harm because all those jumpers man, and the manual was THICC as you say and i was daunted)
(also, i cannot describe to you the conversation i had to have with the customs officer, because down here? They had NO idea what a PC was, forget a hard drive. In retrospect, hilarious; at the time, exhausting) -
My last (and greatest) cassette player. The venerable, unforgotten Nakamichi 1000ZXL.
She never forgave me this purchase.
And i never cared. She really feels like it, she can always pack it and go, lol
There’s more, but i tend to write long posts, so i’ll cease here 
custom console hardware. Old consoles were something special…now it’s all S/GaaS on subsidized commodity hardware.
Other than that…I miss the good old modem handshake sound. Should be preserved in an archive next to Schubert and Tchaikovsky.
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I was pretty bummed when Gamers Nexus got rid of that in their new outro 
That was one of my biggest filters, in recently buying a car [aside from AWD / etc.]
After driving a rental on last time traveling ['2019 Audi A6 TDi], I never felt so eager to ditch a car and dread the future of personal car. The button count was sparse, E-Brake was a button shudder, no rotary dial and multiple touch screens, that just NEVER played nice with me [until I’ve hit 10mins of swearing and relentless tapping]… Driving was actually great and surprisingly nimble [for its size], but my intrigue to buy factor new [or future used] was dead-on-0.
I placed a hard filter on various cars, that I knew were converting to TS or already had fully committed, or EoL models were too old to have entertained idea of touchscreen(s).
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RiscOS
try it on a pi. it’s so damn fast and also not as retro feature deprived as you might think
click on things and it reacts basically instantly
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This thing. Compaq Armada 1590T. Still works and still holds up battery charge. So many LAN parties behind it and serial cable binge gaming. Also my travel laptop for gaming stand alone DOS games that do not require Glide.
Beside it, I’d say original US Robotics Pilot, HP hx4700 IPAQ (I worn out the screen on that one, it was used all day every day, I kept my life in that thing, it still works but it has issues with modern internet and for that matter any wifi that is not pure B or G WEP) and most notably, IBM 5160, my first PC that i got in 1993 from some write-off for free that got me into this madness.
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This seems like a thread people don’t mind being necro’d, so let me contribute … the iPod. With a wheel interface. Click or touch. I do find the 3rd gen’s touch-only to be the weakest of the iPod designs, but they later combined the touch wheel with tactile buttons and that design is IMO the best of most worlds.
I don’t actually have one of these anymore (I never had this model),but that wheel interface was the most intuitive thing ever prior to general touch screens taking over, and I still miss it. Not for finding music in my collection, but specifically for audiobooks and podcasts. Very easy to do with that wheel. Very frustrating to do with buttons (real or touch, though you could do it without looking at the screen when they were real at least!)
But that scroll wheel was the perfect natural interface element to finding the correct part of something that could be 20 minutes or 20 hours long.
I’ve had a hand at trying to reimplement it on a touchscreen, thinking maybe I could maybe hack it in to an audio player or something but … there’s something about the physical ring with physically defined borders a phone’s touchscreen is missing.
I was also pretty partial to my Palm device, though with my vision I couldn’t reasonably use one until the screens became TFT backlit color. I miss how effectively the apps tended to do one thing, do it well, talk to other apps to do other things, and generally not get in your way while doing them. It was the closest I think I have ever seen to the UNIX philosophy in a GUI.
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Aureal A3D. Better positional audio out of 2 speakers than I’ve ever heard on a 5+.1 setup. Was frequently accused of wallhacks playing shooters because of it, when it was just that I could hear people well enough to just know where they were – from a 2.0 desktop speaker set, never mind headphones. Alas, Creative bought them out and buried it.
It’s impressive that with the modding community, these things are still some of the best digital audio players available.
The 6502 cpu. Punches so far above its weight.
It’d be less of a loss if Creative’s own equivalent, EAX - had itself persisted as a technology. It seems that there wasn’t even place for the one of them in the market. I think it was at least in the same range a leap in immersion as 3dfx themselves brought to play, to the right kind of game* - but you couldn’t take screenshots of it.
* Thief: Dark Project
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Tube driven equipment( radios and tvs)
The smell of the ozone from a cathode wire.
The warmth coming off the units.
my favorite is the reel-to-reel music player thing. I’ll never have one, probably never be in the same room as one but the audio quality is still the best compared to even modern stuff…there’s a good video about that one showing examples on youtube just its been a long while since i saw and couldn’t remember the title if i had to…