Digital is always better in some ways, but of course not in every aspect. There are some cases where the analog mechanism still has merit because it does /something/ that digital cannot -- yet it is being phased out anyway because of this naive attitude that digital is wholly superior.

VOIP vs POTS

• POTS phone lines are powered. When you have a power outtage, that is when it is most important to have POTS. Yet as a society, we are not smart enough to figure this out. We will all be helpless sitting ducks in power outages, unable to communicate.

• POTS phone lines serve modem and fax transmissions reliably. VOIP is fragile shit. Sure, modems and faxes /sometimes/ /somewhat/ work over VOIP, if conditions are just right.. certain codecs must be in play as well as netneutrality (low latency) and QoS. VOIP is ultimately an enshitification.

• Perhaps we could argue that voice quality is better over POTS than VOIP.

FM radio vs. DAB

• Advertising is a reality and channel surfing a shit-show on DAB. Every receiver takes a different amount of time to decode the AAC or whatever is in the digital signal. This means when you hear an ad or some garbage, you must wait 5 or so seconds for every single channel change. In principle, a receiver could incorporate 2 tuners to make this quicker. But I don’t think any do this.

• A bad signal results in silence, which means a lot of people who use clock radios will wake up later than planned. Could also be fixed in receivers, but still all those without such a (currently nonexistent) feature will show up to work late.

fax vs. email

• Although it’s theoretically possible to have an email service that does not expose your email address to the recipient, such a thing does not currently exist. Email forces us to share our email address w/recipients who we do not trust.

• Faxes are universally accepted. But e-mail is a shit-show of Google and Microsoft and others being fussy about how a msg is sent, and rejecting on a whim whatever the fuck they want to reject. Faxes do not have this problem. Faxes just work.

'Better' depends a lot of what one is looking for. And what one consider more important which might not always be convenience or efficiency. To share just two personal examples:

• Even though ebooks are more portable, take less space to collect, are easier to copy and paste quotes from, and are often cheaper, I have chosen to go back to reading print (aka analog) books and newspapers and magazines because to me they offer two things I value a lot more than the rest: a much better privacy-respecting experience (no tracking going on) and the full ownership/property of the books I purchase (No one can remotely edit a print book sitting in my home library, nor delete it for whatever reason. Sure, I know very well one can hack DRM out of most ebooks but I don't want to deal with that for things I already paid for, that i snot how purchase is supposed to work). I also consider analog books a lot more focused tools (without distractions), helping read longer without interruptions. Edit: Plus, I enjoy reading that way a lot more.
• I write longhand also for privacy concerns but I do it mostly because it is how I like to write.
  I know very well I can type a lot faster faster than I write in cursive, I can edits too and backups. It's just not what I need the most when I write.

Faxes are shit, they are hard and rarely works and no one expects them anymore (nobody expected them even 10 years ago)

I enjoy reading with e-reader a lot more, they are far more convenient, have in-built dictionaries and TOC with which you can skip to any part of the book, fonts can be changed, made bigger or smaller, margins can be changed, density can be changed, etc, etc. You can have tens of thousands of books on a single e-reader and your own opds catalog with thousands more. Also they don't smell and you can easily mark and bookmark things with descriptions.

Good for you, I'm glad you're enjoying them. As I was saying, I care more about my privacy and the true ownership. I could have added I also appreciate a much nicer page layout with most print books.

You can have tens of thousands of books on a single e-reader

I don't read that many books at the same time but, here again like I said, I realize ebooks help saving space.

I had a client who refused to use eMail, and used fax until it was really fringe. The guy got hit by massive spam calls, and wasted paper and toner (thankfully not ink or thermal) like crazy. I believe faxes do have some use cases even today, but they are rather fringe.

Faxes are shit,

Not if you know what you’re doing. Of course it’s shit if you feed a copy of a copy of a color doc into a scanner and send to a machine that thermo-prints hard copies from a roll of thin paper.

If you compose in LaTeX using the Lucida Fax font, generate a group 3 fax TIFF and directly send that to a recipient competent enough to keep it electronic, the quality is so crisp the only clue that it’s a fax would be by someone with a meticulous recognition of that font, if not from a fax header.

they are hard and rarely works

You have to plug the machine in and power it on. Then it works. Of course email has the same prerequisite, and much more.

For me, email rarely works. Google and Microsoft mail servers reject RFC-compliant mail from my mail server, so probably over 90% of email recipients are on a broken infra.

and no one expects them anymore (nobody expected them even 10 years ago)

True, as most people are not competent enough to realise fax avoids fussy and broken anti-spam algos, and that it minimises their exposure to tracking and surveillance when corresponding with an encryption-naive recipient.

The guy got hit by massive spam calls,

Obviously he did not know what he was doing. Foolish to expose a voice number to gratis 3rd-party fax services. If you do it right you get neither voice spam nor written spam. Sending email and sharing an email address is a good recipe for receiving spam.

and wasted paper

Fax does not require paper on either side of the transmission, so no need for waste.

and toner (thankfully not ink or thermal) like crazy.

Toner implies laser which wastes substantially more energy than inkjet. But of course the wisest fax recipients don’t bother with hard copies at all in the first place.

I believe faxes do have some use cases even today, but they are rather fringe.

That’s because privacy and data minimisation is fringe. Boycotting Microsoft and Google is also fringe.

LaTeX

There are close to 3 people in the world that compose them the way you describe.

plug the machine in and power it on

Also you have to have a fixed phone line and recipient as well, and your telephone exchange needs to be something that is from the last century. In any other case it won't work the way you describe.

everything else

Fax doesn't work for the vast majority of people for multitude of reasons.

There are close to 3 people in the world that compose them the way you describe.

Luckily anyone can join the club if they want their faxes to have over-achieving quality. There is no law against it.

Also you have to have a fixed phone line

Not at all:

1. There are 3rd party fax services who can send it for you.
2. Fax over VOIP works if you select the right algo and have reasonable latency.

Side note: “fixed lines” are just an illusion. You can subscribe to a POTS line but unless you are in a quite primitive region it will just be a VOIP service that is hidden from you at the end of your street.

Fax doesn’t work for the vast majority of people for multitude of reasons.

There are only 2 credible obscure corner cases that yield a fax failure. Countless things break email. Email is broken as shit:

1. Noone will join the club
2. What you just described is nothing like just power it on and it works.
3. Everything else is irrelevant, there was no statement that email is better.

Healthcare still uses it quite a bit. For some reason....

At the office I worked at for a bit, we had a machine that would turn the FAX messages into PDFs and then let the department know they received something rather than printing everything. It even had spam filters and while/black list services. It was like a much worse internet, but it did work. Ive heard people got raspberry pis to do relatively the same thing.

Im not saying your wrong, but there is a bit more nuance in the real world.

No electricity to power a book is a big plus. Also its harder to track if I just give the book to another person. Arguable easier to find later on as its on your shelf.

Its better for consumers because they can distribute said thing rather than deal with Digital DRM.

Yeah, probably depends on the part of the world and culture a lot.

Very true.