I'm noticing some trends with recycling IT and bring back old computers to life. I'm on my 10th computer rebuilt from spares, old parts, recycled platforms and free stuff. Some of it is "meh" while other aspects seem to be more than just accidents or coinkidinks:

• Mainstream OS platforms don't like recycled equipment. Not surprising, most of the latest OS' like Windows 11 and Mac OS are specifically written to force users to use the latest equipment, presumably driving sales of product that the companies also have their hands in.
• Recycled equipment works perfectly fine with the Internet today if you're willing to not "drive" around at T5 "porsche" speeds. In other words, it's not going to work for the latest Call of Duty ultra-graphic game version, but it works fine for 99 percent of regular work online, including browsing and video.
• Bread and butter equipment is disappearing. For example, in the AM4 field, the B450 and B550 mobos are becoming scarce. The last of the new inventory still sitting around unsold is being gobbled up, probably because the DDR4 demand is so high thanks to crazy pricing of DDR5 and higher.
• Mobos and DDR chips work fine used, used hard drives a kryptonite. 95% of the stuff sold used is sold because it's breaking or already broken and offloaded in used sales as a scam. It's quite easy to generate a good health screen on a drive and avoid detailing the fact that it has a bunch of bad sectors. The problem doesn't arise with normal storage activity. Bad drives becomes apparent and obvious with heavy read/write activity such as using them for an OS drive. They fail almost consistently under stress.
• Got cables? Frick, whoever said there was a scarcity of different adapters and cables is full of shit. I have boxes and boxes of cables ranging from the old dot-matrix printer parallel cables to Iomega drive cables to VGA to every USB thinkable. What's funny is that I don't come across the DVI format that much. Displayport is more likely to show up and HDMI is as a common as road asphalt.
• I find local neighborhood markets are the best places to get whole lots sales of parts. Peeps are just lazy and have no idea how to part out an old tower or PC so they just want someone to take it off their hands for $25 or less. I got a great condition Z9 tower case for free from a new neighbor who moved in and replaced his old PC with a new one. He literally left it on the driveway for me to pickup, no cash needed, just take it away.
• The only recycled laptops worth fiddling with in recycling tend to be IBM/Lenovo thinkpads. Built well and durable, these babies are very nice and easy to use again. Other stuff was built to break.
• Most people don't know their computers can be used for other stuff once it gets too old for the latest Windows. They literally think it's time to dump it and buy a new one. Blind consumerism en masse.
• Monitors do break or become functionally obsolete over time. They simply can't communicate well with the latest drivers. It's a subtle thing until suddenly one day the monitor glitches and doesn't want to cooperate anymore.

Anyone else noticing interesting trends with older tech stuff?