Why Gen Zers are trashing smartphones for old-school, retro tech: People are just sick of it | Latest Tech News
They’re tossing tech to the trash and seizing a retro reboot.
Gen Zers are ditching glossy smartphones and algorithm-fed apps for classic flip telephones, once-coveted iPods, digital cameras, even typewriters — and jump-starting a less complicated, less plugged-in life.
And dad and mom are scooping up retro tech for their kids, too, as a manner to protect household life and delay the deluge of doomscrolling that is trapping youngsters into digital dependancy.
Sonya Saydakova is among the Gen Zers embracing low-tech over high-tech — including a point-and-shoot digital digital camera. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
About a yr in the past, Sonya Saydakova, a grad scholar at New York University, switched from an iPhone to a dumbed-down Nokia 2780 flip telephone.
“It’s an indescribable feeling to feel so detached and not constantly available,” the 23-year-old raved to The Post.
Saydakova bought a movie show membership, picked up a digital digital camera and a CD participant — and she stop Spotify. She also asks for instructions instead of solely relying on Google Maps, saying the interactions with people on the road have enriched her life.
Reducing her screen time, Saydakova told The Post, has made her really feel liberated, centered, happier — and less anxious.
“We’re culturally at a breaking point,” she maintained. “People are just sick of it.”
Alex Becker, a 34-year-old mom who lives outdoors of Philadelphia, shares Saydakova’s want to eschew tech, telling The Post she is one of “many” dad and mom who have “no interest in getting their kids a smartphone or an iPad.”
Instead, she needs her kids, 5 and 2, to expertise the “joy of childhood” without “the online drama,” she said.
“The second kids get these devices, the innocence of childhood is lost. That’s what I hear from so many parents, like, ‘My daughter is spending every day on Instagram and Snapchat, wanting to buy skincare products, when six months ago she was reading Narnia books.’”
The low-tech swap is an element of a “broader cultural shift away from constant connectivity” and “digital overload,” according to Amanda Michel, US director of advertising and marketing at Backmarket, an online market for refurbished electronics.
Michel told The Post — in an electronic mail, satirically enough — that the location is seeing a “renewed interest in older, simpler devices,” with customers scooping up Wi-Fi-free iPods, MP3 gamers, classic gaming consoles, handheld cameras and more.
Apple’s early-2000s iPods — like these with the traditional click on wheel — are discovering new life. Corbis via Getty Images
In 2025, eBay also noticed “strong signals of growing interest in legacy music devices like iPods and other offline listening tools,” a spokesperson told The Post.
According to the company, iPods have been searched more than 1,300 instances per hour on average globally across 2025, while costs rose between 40% and 60%, relying on the model.
Computers are not his ‘type’
Brooklyn fiction author Dean Jamieson is drafting his works — but not on a pc. Instead, he’s tap-tapping away on a metal-green handbook typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32, which was first launched in 1964.
He had thought of getting a typewriter for a while, Jamieson admitted to The Post, “but I’m kind of a procrastinator and I’m pretty cheap.”
Dean Jamieson’s girlfriend bought him an outdated handbook typewriter that he’s utilizing to put his phrases to literal paper. stefano Giovannini for NY Post
His girlfriend discovered one on eBay, nabbing it from “some Russian guy in Queens; it was his mother’s and hadn’t been touched.” She gave it to Jamieson for his twenty sixth birthday last November.
He likes the “tactility” of seeing the phrases on a bodily web page, having the ability to edit “by hand on paper,” instead of wanting at a “ticking cursor on the screen,” he said.
“The biggest thing is having no access to the internet,” Jamieson added. “When you’re trying to write on your computer, I find it to be very distracting and destructive.”
He described the retro tech pattern more as a “general attitude,” including that many of his associates are studying books, going to the flicks, and getting off their telephones.
“These things are kind of liberating and can be really nice and pleasurable,” he said.
Pennsylvania mother Becker also feels a sense of pleasure, combined with nostalgia. By listening to music on Spotify, she realized her style in tunes has gotten “really narrow,” and she misses listening to a selection of music and delving into a full album.
She strives to “preserve some of that ’90s childhood” for her kids, even snagging a used growth box (bear in mind those?) with a compact disc participant, dusting off her outdated assortment and thrifting CDs.
Her youngsters “love it,” she said.
Another cause Becker and others are selecting refurbished tech is the invasion of discarded electronics, which, according to the World Health Organization, is the fastest-growing strong waste stream in the world.
In 2022, the WHO reported that an estimated 62 million tons of e-waste have been produced globally. Many discarded devices, like telephones and laptops, include poisonous supplies, such as lead and mercury.
“I get a sinister feeling from how much waste we produce,” 26-year-old Rachel Reich told The Post. “I try not to buy things when I don’t need them.”
Saydakova shows some of her retro gear. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
Making the swap
Last May, when Reich’s iPhone was on “its last leg,” Reich downgraded after years of devotion to tech.
“I didn’t develop normal hobbies,” the New Yorker confessed about her decade-plus dependancy to Instagram, noting that she bought her first smartphone when she was just 9. “After school, I would just be scrolling.”
A few years in the past, she read about the dangerous results it has on the mind and hung up a signal in her room proclaiming: “Doomscrolling is rotting your brain.”
But she still couldn’t stop.
“I was deleting and redownloading Instagram multiple times a day,” she recalled.
Finally, her dying iPhone freed her. She purchased a UniHertz Jelly Star 2E, a smartphone with a 3-inch screen.
“It’s bite-sized,” Instagram-free Reich said in triumph. “It structurally inhibits you from going on it.”
New Yorker Rachel Reich changed her iPhone with a UniHertz Jelly Star like this one.
Reich’s “bite-sized” cell is barely longer than a pinky finger.
Reich also thought of her finances.
“Two hundred bucks for the UniHertz was pretty cheap compared to a new iPhone,” she said.
“Pre-owned and refurbished devices,” an eBay spokesperson explained to The Post, are an “affordable alternative as digital storage and subscription costs evolve.”
Can you go back in time?
During COVID, devices turned unavoidable for schoolkids. Now, many dad and mom are “trying to walk that back,” Washington, DC, mother Elizabeth Mitchell told The Post.
Jamieson’s typewriter is one of the “liberating” low-tech objects he appreciates. stefano Giovannini for NY Post
She bought her 13-year-old son two disposable cameras for his spring break trip and nabbed a used iPod on eBay to steer clear of web entanglements.
“He likes to listen to music when he’s going to bed. I’ve been struggling to find devices where he can do that without having access to the internet,” she said.
NYC Gen Zers also told The Post they are utilizing digital cameras instead of their smartphones to take footage — and some are even capturing their films on 16mm and on 35mm movie.
“There has been this resurgence pushed by a lot of young people that are experiencing film for the first time, because we come from a world that was all digital,” Joji Baratelli, a 26-year-old photographer and collector of classic still and film cameras, told The Post.
“It’s an indescribable feeling to feel so detached and not constantly available,” Saydakova said of ditching fashionable gear. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
Baratelli’s oldest still digital camera, which he continuously makes use of, dates to the Thirties.
At a deli in Manhattan, a 27-year-old store clerk, who declined to give his identify, proudly confirmed The Post a Nineteen Fifties Royal Aristocrat typewriter he acquired after inheriting it from a neighbor who died.
He cited a nostalgic loss of household connection for appreciating outdated tech.
“We used to wake up, see our moms, and eat our breakfast,” he lamented. “Now we wake up and go straight to our phones.”
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