This Christmas there’s a good chance that you or a family member will receive (or have bought) new electronics as gifts. The Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales will have encouraged many people to buy new state-of-the-art technology. This supersedes their old tech, which will now be recycled or thrown away. Perhaps your stocking won’t include a new smartphone, voice enabled speaker or other ‘must have’ tech. If so, the January sales will provide ample opportunity to splurge out on electronics at very competitive prices!

When you open that shiny new product, it may represent an upgrade, or be bigger and better. What you might not realise, however, is that the technology driving it probably hasn’t changed dramatically in recent years. For example, electronic products use printed circuit boards (PCBs). These may have shrunk to minuscule proportions, but the technology hasn’t changed much since they were first invented. For more on the history of the PCB see our blog here. Each new innovation in old technology creates new opportunities to enhance and refine the electronic products PCBs are used in.

That minuscule PCB is what makes the Internet of Things possible. Here, technology is Lilliputian in size so that everyday electronics can be connected. Without these advances that smart kettle you unwrapped on Christmas Day would be monstrous in size!

Our experience working on Electronic Box Build projects often highlights how we use older technology to facilitate new innovations. Let’s not forget that old tech was once new technology. In the scheme of things, it is often not that old at all. In the last hundred years we have seen phenomenal advances in technology. These have accelerated even more in the last few decades. This poses the question: “What constitutes old tech?” Is it something from the 1930s or 40s, like the printed circuit board? Is it technology invented in the 1980s, such as the CD? Or is ‘old’ tech that iPhone 7 you’ve just replaced with an iPhone X?

The building blocks of any new electronic product – what goes in the box – haven’t changed that much. Yet consumers may think that they have a state-of-the-art product. (No wonder that there is a booming market in recycling old electronics and reusing components.) What we see instead is a combination of older technology, new improved old tech, and occasionally something brand spanking new. Together, these create new electronic products. Compare products designed and manufactured a few decades ago with those we have bought this Christmas. Perhaps the most significant difference is the product shelf life. That is driven more by our appetite for new products than genuinely original technological advances.

Ultimately, in many cases, old technology hasn’t gone away at all; it’s just been repackaged as something new. So when you buy your new electronics this Christmas think about what is actually in the box. Old technology that is standing the test of time and helping us innovate into the future.