Just when you thought accessories cashing in on the Apple brand were getting genuinely useful again, along comes this antiquated 'invention' by Edinburgh-based industrial designer Austin Yang. Described as bringing back the “old feeling of typing”, all the while integrated with “the latest technology”, the iTypewriter looks the ultimate hipster magnet.

The users polled on Huffington Post have already speculated the old-fashioned keyboard is a part of a grander conspiracy conjured by those highest at Apple to “crack more iPad screens and cash in on the subsequent replacements”, and you'd be forgiven for having the same feelings towards the scarily hard-hitting type bars that give the Retina Display of the iPad a considerable whack greeting each keystroke. Or, in marketing terms, the iKeyboard possesses “strong haptic feedback” allowing the typist to really feel every single key press.

Not one for us then – we're still finding reasons to want to bash our iPad screen in, getting there – but still the iTypewriter is a novel distraction from the like-for-like typing attachments looking to move in before Microsoft's Surface truly captures the keyboard-meets-tablet market.

Richard Birkett