Old hardware is still a joy
I recently got a 27-inch, Late 2012 iMac as a gift from my boyfriend. His work was giving it away for free as they no longer needed it and he asked me if I wanted it for the hell of it. I, of course, said yes because I'd been wanting an iMac for my bedroom for some time now. (More specifically the yellow M1 version but that was not justifiable price-wise)
Now that I have this 12 year old iMac in my possession, I now find it to be more fun to fiddle with than the M1 would've been. The large display works fantastically as a TV and despite its age, forcing it to run macOS Sonoma via OpenCore has proved to be a great move. The HDD does slow things down in a noticeable way but it still runs quite smoothly. I plan on getting an SSD for it some time soon as well as maxing out the RAM (which is user-replaceable and can go up to 32GB of DDR3 1600 MHz, currently it only has 8GB).
My greater point of sharing all this besides my own excitement at a new toy is that old hardware is still so much fun to use and play around with. Just a little bit of work in software and hardware can go such a long way in improving the experience while still continuing to use old, already-built, perfectly functional machines. I've been using this iMac for general personal use even more often than my M1 MacBook Air lately and it continues to delight me.
While I'm not going to pretend I'm not a heavier consumer of new tech, I think it is important to recognize there is a lot that can still be done on older hardware especially in most personal use cases. We should try and take advantage of this old hardware whenever possible to save ourselves money and also make whole the lifecycle of tech rather than treating it with disposability like we often do nowadays.