About a year ago, I looked at my collection of old phones and laptops and smirked at my needless hoarding.

Now? I feel like I'm sitting on gold by keeping these cheap dumb devices around.

I'd still consider it hoarding.

Depending on how old they are, phones have diminishing network compatibility, and cheap, dumb devices are in production still, and will be for the indefinite future. So it's not like they are a resource that the world has run out of.

Old laptops age better, but it's not like anyone restricts software on laptops, or will ever be able.

2G and 3G networks are already being dismantled, if not already gone, in several parts of the world. Even if you do want to stick to those devices out of principle, you often can't, or if you can, only for maybe 5 more years.

You can still buy equivalent dumb phones, but they aren't any more open than the rest of the rabble.

Laptops are a different story, although I believe part of that battle was already lost when the Intel SSM and AMD equivalent came around. We'll see how things go when banks start to require you to enable (In)Secure Boot just to be able to log in through a browser on a PC.

Until they deprecate old SIM cards and make new ones that refuse to work in legacy phones.