I count it from the date when support or manufacturing ended:
RandomStranger wrote on 2021-01-27, 13:49:For me it's retro if manufacturing and/or support have ended at least 10 years ago and vintage if a generation have grown up since it's manufacturing/support ended.
A 10 years old PC, even if high end is at best good for some browsing and some light office work. My previous daily driver just about turned 10 when I sold it in December. For gaming, the Phenom X6 CPU it had already couldn't launch some recent titles because of the lack of support for certain instruction sets. That's true for the Core2 CPUs as well I think. That doesn't mean they are interesting retro, just retro.
If I consider the prices, it's about 15 years when PC parts reach their low-point, but the price naturally influenced by rarity. The highest end parts, things like the 8800 Ultra and the Core2 Quad QX6700 are already climbing back as they become a collectible item. The performance category (8800GT, 9600GT, Q6600, E8500) are pretty much stuck on their low points for at least the next 10 years. Trash you can get out of office PCs like the various Pentium Dual Cores and GT210, 8400GS, 9400GT series will probably never gain value as the TNT2 M64, S3 Trio64 and the 90s Celerons never did.
And if it's a matter of age and weirdness, the Ageia PhysX accelerator cards are also about 15 years old (give or take a year or 2) and while they are just oddities with little to no practical value, they are moderately rare and the branded ones fly off the shelves.
I'm much more concerned about the future. Cloud shit, rolling release Windows, digital only games can easily kill retro gaming on contemporary hardware. GoG is light in the darkness with its DRM free library you can archive and play offline, but not everything releases there. 20 years from now when the GTX1080 Ti and Ryzen 7 1800X will be close to a quarter of a century old (the same age as the Voodoo II now), you really won't be able to do much with them beyond putting them in a display case. Unless you rely on pirated software.
As for software, it's much blurrier. Is Windows XP retro? Support has been completely cut, game launchers aren't working anymore, doesn't get browser updates, no drivers. So Windows 7, the developer ended its support, third parties are also leaving it behind. Games? The original 2006 Prey, the original 2005 Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Wolfenstein 2009 are stuff you can't legally buy and for some of them, retail copies are also rare and expensive. I'm hunting for an NFS:MW non-german, non-ea classics PC version that doesn't cost more than when it released for over a year now.