It works great for notes, it’s not great for recording data because if it mishears me/I mumble once an entire set of 500+ observations can be frame shifted away from their identifiers and I have to redo it

Gesture typing is definitely faster, but I find it much less accurate and requires vision. My old sliding phone I could write whole essays in my hoodie pocket while walking home with few to no typos, which was a niche use-case for sure but an existing one. I work outside a fair amount and would love having that back for notetaking in the field

Sure, but so do a lot of other things that aren’t as costly. If NFTs were the first secure way to authenticate things online we wouldn’t have had online banking until very recently

A lot of advanced analytical tools in biotech at least are developed to be compute cluster compatible, and thus work best on unix-like CLI, e.g. Linux (or Mac with a bit of tinkering)

In addition to what Blisterex said, the open-source hardware ethos is very similar to the Linux open-source software ethos, so it attracts a similar crowd