I'm a minimalist and retro-enthusiast, but...

> You probably don't need to sync everything.

Gladly, but I do need my email, calendar, reminders, contacts, and notes to stay in sync between my phone and my computer, because that's how I stay on top of things. In 2004 I was in high school, had a fixed weekly schedule, met all my friends every day in class. I wish I could go back to these years, but the world has moved on, and insists on moving forward. I'd prefer to save my effort for things that matter.

> You probably don't need a backup vendor.

True, and I still keep all of my personal backups on-site. But my 2004 photos would've been gone several times if I didn't start caring about backups at all at some point. Still I had to perform surgical data recovery, multiple times, because hardware keeps physically failing. Handing the problem over is a perfectly reasonable (even wiser) strategy.

Also no, I'm not printing 15k+ photos.

My future project is doing hi-res scans of all the stuff my mother keeps, some of it pre-WW2. "What's the point of keeping it?" Whatever, it will be gone like all of us someday, but in the meantime - there's a "Never Again" story behind it, and I want to retell it in full at some point. It may be relevant today.

> You probably don't need to change the OS.

True. Also, I like OS 10.5 better anyway. Problem is, even the high-end 2002 hardware kept in perfect conditions is slowly-but-surely giving up. <https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/>

The more modern stuff puts you on an upgrade treadmill. It's not even that you can't put OS 10.15 on an M1 machine; the security patches dry up sooner than the interest in exploits, meanwhile every new release of macOS breaks more stuff than the previous. You can easily run a modern Linux/BSD on older hardware and enjoy it; we've hit an inflection point around 2010. Except all of my 2006-2013 Thinkpads are already dead, and my 2020 Mac runs circles around my 2019 Thinkpad (which doesn't matter - until you need to compile, render, or transcode stuff). It's like, there's no winning strategy.

> You probably don't need a homelab or massive cluster to run all your stuff.

True. I am running almost everything off a couple RasPi's, and most of it is for fun/experiments (like syncing my RSS feeds, in an attempt to move away from iCloud). The big box (a 2014 SOHO Dell) listens for WOL for the daily backups, and goes back to sleep when done, and that is the trade-off for not having a backup vendor.

Except in 2004 you couldn't buy a credit-card sized computer (!!!) for $50-100 (!!!) that'd provide an excellent price/performance ratio (!!!). The "2004 mode" was one PC per household (maybe with the 1997 still lingering around), sometimes resulting in arguments over time slots.

> [...] you're used to operating in 2024 mode.

Aaand it's 2025, and unfortunately the clock is not slowing down for some reason.

We know things now that we didn't 21 years ago. We've applied that theory to practical engineering, a lot of it achieved mainstream usage. CRDTs, personal SDNs, cheap storage, cheap tiny servers, all the building blocks for decentralisation of personal digital life are within reach. What I'm suggesting is a better path forward.