It's interesting in the sense that there are people that like these old things(walkmans/film cameras) even if they were born in smartphone era. I don't think we can call this nostalgia since they haven't even experienced all these things in the first place
My 15 y/o daughter loves CDs and has a small CD player. Why? She can record whatever she likes on them, do custom artwork and give them to friends. Even if they never play it, they have something tangible and interesting.
Sending playlists to friends using iMessage just isn't the same.
I used to live in a college town while in my late 30s. I went to the drug store to pick up some things around when kids were moving into the dorms. The place was packed with kids picking up photos they wanted prints of. I thought photo labs where becoming a thing of the past, and would soon be removed, if they hadn’t been already, but no. Turned out they wanted the photos to decorate their rooms. As someone who has never printed a digital photo, this concept never crossed my mind.
Due to work I have to sometimes go fishing in development sites/garage sales/etc related to PC hardware from a couple decades ago (think DOS/win16 era). My experience is that I almost never see anyone who actually experienced those things: almost all these "retro" revivals are caused by young people being hyped by devices they _never_ experienced. So there's zero nostalgia.
I don't know what thrill they get from it but I suppose it's "fake" nostalgia in the sense that they want to go back to a past that they have only heard about it (and thus idealized) in writing or in TV series.
IMHO the people who actually experienced those devices for a long-time know to avoid them like the plague they are.
I’ve felt for a long time that everyone is probably interested in the period of their birth, and particularly the years just before. There’s something uniquely weird feeling about that time — you were technically alive for some of it, and yet it’s totally alien to you.
That’s why I think, for example, twenty year-olds today are interested in early 2000s fashion and computers.
for me for example it's the tactile feedback. Smartphones are boring in tactile sense. On the other hand, taking a photo with a manual film camera is completely different: you must load/unload the film, be careful to not rotate the film too much when getting it back into container, manually adjusting focus, advancing the film and hearing all of this or even manually developing the film for bigger nerds. With walkmans it's probably the same but with cassetes - loading/unloading, connecting headset, all the mechanical sounds, different buttons, wheel volume controls, weird designs and colors. We just don't get this kind of tactile&sound feedback with modern laptops&smartphones and their colors are usually boring too, esp in recent years
there's something about older technology like tape and old CRT displays where the fundamental inner workings are so different to how they're done now but are still totally understandable, sometimes it feels like modern hardware is just magic rocks that make have electricity go in and lights come out, but looking at the older stuff feels more interesting because it's easier to understand without having to abstract it as much
