This is a bit of a vague topic title so I will try to make my meaning more specific.

What would you define as old and very old hardware? Would you define it in years or ability or both?

If you had a graphics card that could max out everything when it was released, and then some years later it is unable to play the latest games, is it then old? Or would you say that it's more to do with years - e.g. after 5 or 10 years something is 'old' or very old after 20?

Does one measure 'oldness' by gaming ability relative to previous performance or by general ability to browse the web or both?

It's harder to quantify with CPUs. I have an Atom N270, it's now just over 10 years old, but it now struggles to play online videos, sometimes it can't do it at all. Whereas I have a quad core for my desktop which is nearly as old which has no problem. So would the Atom be 'very old' and the quad just 'old'?

One may ask, "why does this even matter?" Because it's useful to know when one should start expecting less of one's hardware and not putting it through its paces as much as before.

Hi,

Hardware is always changing along with support OS therefore the challenges for hardware to keep up is in flux all the time.

In the past we would use Moore's Law to gauge technology changes by density of the transistors on a substrate. Doubling now occurs in months rather than years so operations can change dramatically so older hardware may have a steep drop in ability to keep up.

Much like myself, daily activity is a challenge as I get older. I must force myself to keep moving or just sit around and become non-productive. I fight daily to keep active so I can continue to live. Our older technology can be looked at in the same way. Abilities do degrade as the requirements are pressed by changes daily. At some point a user must decide when they will put that hardware to rest period. Or just regress to keep it going by backing down to older process that still support that grade level.

I am presently using a Laptop that is 6 years old but has been tweaked to hopefully get a few more years of duty. But a point of time will come when this girl will be put to rest. I've doubled the memory, added SSD support but the GPU will be the stop gap. I am not a gamer so I should get more time with her.

I have retired several towers the last few years. Upgrades would not help since the money spent would be wasted. I have a few notebooks that will soon be retired. Cheap to replace so no need to keep around.

I have a few Kindles but those are just readers so they should be around much longer. Heck, the batteries will probably fail long before the system.

So I think it is a personal decision as to when hardware is old and not useful since that depends on how that users allows the continued use.

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy your hardware as long as possible!

I would say, the ability to do whatever it is you want or need to do.
It has been my experience that graphic cards are the first to "get old."
My last two motherboards were replaced because of component failure. I had a Asus/Athlon board that I might still be using if it hadn't been made with purposely inferior capacitors from that batch from the PRC which were sold, supposedly, under a legitimate name and were said to have been from a different country. Millions of people were affected and ended up with junk electronics.
But, I digress.
Were it stilll "alive" at this point in time it may well be past its time to be replaced, but I kept it going. A new graphics card would always work wonders. Adding RAM helps, but now adding a SSD makes the most immediately noticeable improvement. An adaptor for this or that and it kept right on ticking.... until the capacitors started to leak.
Oh, well....
The newer hardware is amazing. I haven't ran into any software that can slow it down. In the past you
could see an performance improvement by using the generic kernal, but with "modern" hardware I cannot perceive a bit of difference between the generic and huge kernels.

This can vary from one person to other... I do not tend to focus on the age of hardware, but more on reliability.

For home usage, my machine is 8-years old, and besides a dead battery it works fine (for what I need to do). But then again, I do not play games, so I did not think of upgrading graphics card.
Kids have Chromebook at school, so I gave them my laptop from college days with Core-2-Duo running Ubuntu (upgraded memory). They have not complained yet.

I think it will also depend on how one uses the machine, some tend to take care of their machines better than others, which can help extend life-span.

Kind of like a car, which is 18-years old with over 200K miles, but works fine (for what I need it for), so no need to go and purchase a new...

Sorry, some (or perhaps all) of this is not what you are looking for?

If more recent hardware clearly outperforms old hardware, while being more energy efficient, then I consider the old hardware "old" (otherwise it's just old cause of age) .
Old doesn't mean useless, though, I have only upgraded my home computer last year because 4GB of RAM were not doing it anymore for anything but the simplest compilations for Qt programs while multijobbing/threading, and my MB only supported 4GB, and new MB meant new CPU socket, etc pp.

(Sad, too, cause my fancy sound card is PCI...and this MB only has PCI-E ...)

A lot of old hardware is perfectly usable, if it weren't for all that pesky software becoming more and more demanding...

Yep, software bloat is the root cause of needing to upgrade.

I was using a 2008 laptop until I recently got hold of an 'old' chromebook, (2014 & no more updates for that version of ChromeOS), it now run a genuine Linux distro, my regular one, both have only 2GB ram, but the old one was a 1.2GHz, the new one is a bit faster, has eMMC, & is more usable for online stuff.

Old is when a computer can't keep up with your particular needs, as well as its physical age.

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I built my machine myself in around 2010/2011 with all of it's hardware apart from one of it's hard drives being brand new at build time. Since it's now 2020, then physically speaking, it's "old", but since it has an i7 processor and I can therefore run anything on it (probably even Windows 10 no problem - not that I've actually tried to though); then I don't consider it to be "old" in it's "useful" sense. So overall, I'm not sure if that means my machine is "old" or just "not new", as in: I didn't buy or build it yesterday.

That said, I'd agree that it's up to whoever you ask as what "old" means in the "computer context". :shrugs:

It's pretty subjective. If a piece of hardware will only run an unsupported OS, then it is only an issue (security wise) if connected to the Internet, as long as the hardware does what the owner/end user wants it to. This means it will pretty much last forever, if something doesn't break.

If a system connects to the Internet, it is in the user's best interest to make sure all patches are applied, etc, but this assumes the OS and all software installed is updated. Once the software is no longer supported but the hardware is still good, then it gets frustrating because there is nothing wrong with the hardware but you can't safely use it for the reasons you bought it.

My wife's 10 year old MacBook Pro is still trucking along fine and once her OS is no longer supported, I'll just update her browser until I can't get a modern browser to run, then will get her a new laptop. Planned obsolescence via Apple. If she doesn't want me to get her a new laptop, I'll need to run Ubuntu or something on it. She only uses a browser so should be good.

My 9 or 10 year old HP z800 is still trucking along nicely but it is running a modern supported version of FreeBSD so will last until the hardware dies.

I replaced my z800 as my desktop because of a couple of reasons: the 5 minute boot time due to LSI raid controllers, the 1100 watt power supply and resulting heat and electrical usage from that and the dual Xeons. I built a relatively power friendly modern PC which will last at least 10 years provided the hardware does...knock on wood.

My personal definition of old is as soon as it's past the main support window (usually 3 or 5 years) of the manufacturer, it's old. If it's outlived 2 support windows, it's very old.

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For me, it's only old if it won't do what I need it to or requires special treatment.

My desktop, which died at Christmas after 15 years service, was old because the 32-bit AMD CPU only supported one browser, PaleMoon SSE, so it was earmarked for replacement anyway.

My spare laptop, an IBM X31 Thinkpad with a Banias Pentium M, is old because it will only run Debian, AntiX, or Xubuntu — and the last will abandon it this year.

PCs are like people, it's not an age thing, but purely an ability thing!

"Decades ago" I had two passions besides work, on-line racing (NR2003/GTP, GTR2 anyone?) and the Silent Hunter submarine simulator...

Upgraded like a maniac until ending up with (still) current i7-930 and 5970/5870 in Tri-Fire. Runs the 3D graphics in Silent Hunter IV without breaking sweat... no more reasons to upgrade.

Everything is still running as rock solid as when built. Age means nothing!

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I decided my desktop machine was too old when it stopped booting recent kernels unless I switched off acpi. With a bit of help from the community, I got a patch that would make them bootable but I knew then that I had to move on. So I bought another second-hand machine and I'm very happy with it.

My definition of an computer that is not too old:
Capable of installing and run at least OpenBox based distro (like Bunsenlabs) 32 bit, and that the CPU have the SSE2 flag (no graphical web browsers can run without).

When the day comes when it is not possible to get an active 32 bit OS, then I'll regard all 32 bits computers as too old.

From the user's point of view, I think old hardware means it can't satisfy what it has to do. This means perhaps that an experienced user can make a machine usable for longer (by selecting proper software, o.s. or settings) than any non experienced user.

From the manufacturer's and market's point of view, old is rather what costs more than "equivalent" hardware based on newer technology. So, I think that "old" is related rather to the particular technological generation it belongs to, rather than its absolute age. I mean 386, 486, pentium, i7, Athlon, Phenom, Opteron etc.

I remember the following (true) story from the mid 1990s: I had to look for upgrade of the computers in my job (running engineering software/drawing/cad + office software). I think it was the Pentium-something era. I would be happy with just more RAM. At the time a new RAM type was out, 4 times less expansive than previous one, but it was electronically incompatible with the sockets/motherboards of our computers. So, in order to profit from the newer RAM electronics a new motherboard generation was needed, together with processor and graphics card. Newer LAN ethernet cards would be good to replace the older BNC cards for a better network. New PS2 keyboard and mouse were rather cheap, so finally the only parts we could keep from the old towers would be the box and the power supply; the risk was that a power supply unit already working for a few years would probably die soon, so it would be more costly to fix it then. I was persuaded that it wouldn't worth to try to just replace one or a few parts. I think I switched the old computer on a few times later, just to read some 5.25 in floppies!

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Honestly, I'm not sure...I think a lot just depends on if it can still be used by yourself for the tasks that you need. From a Windows and gaming user perspective it seems that if the hardware is 3-5 years old then it's considered "old" to that user.

As for me, "older" hardware doesn't bother me. My usual machines are dual and quad core CPUs with anywhere from 2GB-6GB of RAM. The oldest one used to run Windows Vista, just to give you an idea on age...I may fire it up for some occasional web browsing or something little. I had decided here recently that I was pitching most anything that was Pentium 4 or lower (I may keep 1 for tinkering)...being in IT at work I do manage to acquire the retired PCs/laptop/hardware from time to time. So, I'm keeping any multi-core CPU that's 64 bit capable. Laptops for general use, and desktop/tower PCs to re purpose as some sort of server if needed. I've got plans to put together a multimedia desktop PC at some point running Linux and it will more than likely be more modern hardware. Oh yeah, throughout my hardware collection I don't have a single SSD. All drives are standard hard drives.