Interesting. Today I've come across quite a few stories on analogue tech. This + new Technic SL-1200 models + new vinyl pressing machines being produced due to vinyl demand continuing to grow + record players and instant film cameras being incredibly popular on Amazon this Christmas. I wonder if we'll see this occur to other analogue tech too?
Once upon a time the only way to get some text printed was to hire somebody to arrange lead type letter-by-letter and print your thing on a six-ton iron press. This required significant amounts of training to do well and still resulted in artifacts of the process, in this case slight debossing of the paper as the fibers were crushed between the press and the type.
Then came photolithography and xerox and laser printers, and nobody saw the point of all that labor and machinery.
Then came inkjet printers and Microsoft Word and email, and suddenly a textual message doesn't seem to have the gravitas or expertise that once did. At which point, having something letterpress printed is very noticeable and neat, even if you can't put your finger on what's different, and a person who does letterpress printing has necessarily invested enough time to correlate with passion and a keen typographic eye.
Once the old thing takes off, people really want those artifacts of the antique process, to the point where contemporary letterpress printers are goaded into ramping up the pressure on the press until the paper is crushed to oblivion and your print is ridiculously three-dimensional, more so than would have been acceptable back in old times.
Similarly, people who are shooting on Super 8 these days are really looking for grain and weird color temperature. And it also explains why, like photolithography, 16mm or analog video are neither distinctive nor expensive enough to be as interesting.
There will always be a big market for items of nostalgia, whether it's taking photos, playing music, enjoying ancient video games, or banging out letters on a typewriter. All good fun as long as people don't spout pseudoscience about its inability to be emulated with modern equipment.
Digital music can't simulate having a physical album cover, an e-ink screen won't ever be similar to a printed page, no music encoding will physically prevent loudness-wars mastering the way a vinyl record will (the needle would just jump out of the track), no printer will ever be able to fool someone into thinking a document was written on a typewriter.
You can tell the difference if a piece of mail was signed by a human with a pen instead of a printer, and it means something.
The limitations of analog media are very often their strengths, especially in corner cases. The limitations of a medium are often a significant driver for the creative process and losing them or approximating them makes lots of things worse.
Normally people (morally) opposed to analog media spout just as much pseudoscience in defense of their position. (normally people arguing about such things on the Internet are idiots anyway)
What gives those things value IS the nostalgia though. A computer printed page has clear crisp letters with advanced fonts and typography compared to a typewriter with smudged, fixed-width fonts. E-ink books allow for notes, search, bookmarks and much more. The new is with few exceptions objectively better.
But it's not just about nostalgia. There's the fact that there is more human work and thought involved with doing something by hand. It is a social signal with some of the objectively "worse" ways that will stick around for awhile.
I still like real wood... It's never "perfect" the processing can never be as precise as metal, plastic or other composite materials can get. For that matter, I like glass, which oddly will often show some material imperfections, such as in a table top.
As for books, I simply learn better from the physical book... every time I try e-books I wind up in a blur.. can sometimes happen with very long online articles too. There's no context or position to it all.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather never again have to lug around an 80# monitor, or use a typewriter again... for that matter, I don't much see the point of film over digital capture.
All of that said, there's something to like about natural flaws.
Looks like it doesn't do ballpoint, so it probably can't duplicate the varied indentations into the paper that a ballpoint pen will make. I've been checking mail from my Congresscritters to see which ones are using autopens [0] or similar technology, such as the link you provided. (NB the Wikipedia article for the autopen [0] mentions a model that functions on the x and y axes, but makes no mention of a z axis)
