Ah, the eternal struggle: does that ancient gadget in your drawer spark joy, or just take up space? Our dear columnist, a professional hoarder of tech, faced this existential crisis last weekend and unearthed a relic: an iPhone 4 from 2011.

This tiny phone was once a marvel - the first to ditch AT&T exclusivity, the first to feel like a modern iPhone. But now, with its 3G-only connectivity (which the US killed in 2022), a sluggish A8 processor (we're being generous), and a whopping 8GB of storage, it's more nostalgia than necessity.

After a heroic effort involving a 30-pin dock cable (remember those?), our writer got the thing to power up. The battery held a charge for a glorious 15 minutes. That's about as long as it takes to feel the crushing weight of obsolescence.

The phone couldn't connect to iCloud (authentication protocols from the early 2010s are so last decade), Safari refused to render modern websites (too fancy for its ancient HTML/CSS support), and the App Store was a no-go. Basically, it's a brick with a nice design.

But fear not, you can still use it as a dedicated iPod, a retro game player (if you're into jailbreaking), or a paperweight. It's also a prime candidate for the recycling bin - just remember to do a factory reset, which, fun fact, takes an eternity on this old thing.

So, what's actually worth something? The iPhone 5s from 2013 can still sync to iCloud and run iOS 12.5.7, but no carrier will touch it (no VoLTE). Its resale value? A whopping $5 to $15. The iPhone 8 and X from 2017 are the sweet spot: they run iOS 16, connect to iCloud, and work with most carriers, fetching $30 to $60 on eBay.

Anything newer is actually usable, with resale prices climbing (but not by much) until you hit the current models, where eBay sellers have clearly lost their minds.

In the end, our writer bids adieu to the iPhone 4, delivering it to the recycling center. Because sometimes, as an old editor once said, "You have to dump your darlings." And also because it's a 15-minute battery life away from being a paperweight.

Do you have old tech you're clinging to? Let us know - we're all in this clutter together.