I have the largest collection of "mid-era" items of anybody I know. "Mid-era" means not bought when first unveiled and also not an antique.
Since buying things that are on the bleeding edge of being technological advancement cost tons more than they do a couple years later, I just wait the year or few for the price to drop and spend the savings on other stuff, like bread and milk, etc. There is a constant flow of things that used to be the hot, new thing and is just now being offered dirt cheap. I just time it so I'm on the back side of the wave. Plus, I don't hang out with young people so the stuff is still new and cool to me.
I have a few antiques, but that's just because I bought it at the time described above and I'm old enough that it qualifies to be an antique now.
At first I wasn't going to reply to this thread because I don't consider myself a collector, but there is so much stuff in my house that sometimes it's hard to walk from one end to the other without serious zig-zagging, so I reconsidered because I obviously collect stuff. It's just more subtle and less focused.
Honestly though, I used to try to collect things when I was younger, but because a couple siblings occasionally and repeatedly spent phases with expensive habits, anything anybody owned that had any value ended up "mysteriously" disappearing eventually, so I kind of lost interest in even trying and I still don't have much interest in having a collection of anything. I don't mind having a few pins though because they are very difficult to sneak out of the house without being seen.
