Mechanical switches work when you have gloves on. Touch screens do not. Just to make a point that old != bad.
"Old-Fashioned" and "New-Fangled" are equally idiotic responses to technological change.
And "clunky" is just a meaningless insult. The author should be honest, and say "I don't like it".
Buttons that you have to move half an inch are clunky, they’re also failure points, the #1 death of walkmans was that the read/play head would stop locking in place (or stop unlocking when you hit stop). You can still have buttons that work with gloves on, my MP3 has 3 buttons, on/off, volume up, volume down. Because all they do is engage an electronic contact they move less than mm when you push them. And my touchscreen is pressure triggered not current triggered so it too works with gloves.
It’s not saying that old is necessarily just pointing out that a lot of old stuff showed clear room for improvement. Walkman buttons WERE clunky, because they had to be. They’re not bad because they’re old, they’re bad because they have to be huge with lots of motion and are a frequent point of failure.
I showed you the dictionary entry, it’s not meaningless. And it’s not an insult either, because it’s true. They were clunky, sorry you take that fact personally.