I've suspected for awhile that the recent boom in retro tech is due to how sterile and 'soulless' modern devices are. Cassette tapes have poor sound quality, but the physical act of using them is awesome. They're tacticle, they make cool clicky-whirry sounds. A good tape deck has super satisfying buttons to push. You've got dials and sliders and fidgets that our monkey brains tell us we should play with.

Meanwhile, you get none of that from smartphones. They're some of the most dissatisfying devices to use imaginable. Very little physical or auditory feedback, if any, with 99% of all relevant information being conveyed through artificial onscreen visuals and nothing else. And the screen itself is just a flat featureless piece of glass which is entirely uninteresting to touch.

Hell, even the aesthetics. Every cell phone these days looks and feels almost exactly the same, while there are a ton of different variations in older consumer tech.

I think people are just becoming starved for novel physical stimulation, basically.