Well, this made my week. According to a recent report, shoppers, younger ones especially, are snapping up retro devices. We're talking MP3 players from the 90s and early 2000s, flip phones, point-and-shoot digital cameras, the works. Devices I truly thought were headed for the drawer of forgotten gadgets, right next to my old Palm Pilot.

And I can't say I'm surprised. My first MP3 player held maybe 40 songs, and I thought that was a miracle. You had to actually choose what music went on it. Sit at your computer, pick your albums, drag them over, and then walk around with a little device that did one thing and did it well. No notifications buzzing. No algorithm telling you what to listen to next. Just you and your 40 songs, and you knew every single one of them by heart.

Compare that to today, where your phone is your camera, your bank, your mailbox, your work conference, your newsfeed, and your social life all crammed into one slab of glass. My granddaughter Jess told me recently she feels like she needs a nap after twenty minutes on her phone, and she's a teenager. That's not how technology is supposed to make you feel.

The retro trend makes emotional sense too. A flip phone that opens with a satisfying snap gives you a physical relationship with your device that a touchscreen never will. A point-and-shoot camera forces you to live the moment instead of taking forty versions of it. An MP3 player with a click wheel asks you to be deliberate. These old devices have boundaries built right into them, and it turns out boundaries are exactly what people are craving.

I've said this before and I'll keep saying it: technology should work for you, not the other way around. If a $30 gadget from a secondhand shop makes you calmer than a $1,200 phone does, the fancy phone has a problem. The fact that a whole generation raised on smartphones is figuring this out on their own gives me real hope, let me tell you.

Now, a few practical notes from your friendly neighborhood tech aunt, because I can't help myself. If you're tempted to join the retro revival, check battery health on anything used. Twenty-year-old lithium batteries are usually cooked. And if you go the flip phone route, make sure it supports modern network bands, since a lot of the old 3G-only models simply don't work anymore after the network shutdowns. Nothing sadder than a beautiful brick phone that can't make a call.

There's also a middle path worth considering. A dumbphone-style app setup, or just music downloaded offline onto a cheap player, gets you most of the peace without giving up navigation or emergency calls. Retro for the fun of it is lovely. Retro as a full lifestyle has some real trade-offs.

Still, I hope the trend sticks. Every tech revolution I've lived through, from dial-up to broadband, CDs to streaming, promised to make life simpler, and somewhere along the way we let the devices start making demands of us. If Gen Z buying up click wheels and flip phones is how we course-correct, then I say welcome back to 2004, kids. The water's fine, and the batteries... well, those you'll have to replace.