So my answer is obviously “yes” because I own one of Former’s Rusticated signature Apples, and two different smooth versions of the exact same shape.
Whether or not one should buy one of these is a matter of many, many subjective things, namely price.
Aside from that, I wanted to clarify a few things...
“Semi-handmade” is indeed a little silly. Nearly all pipes are made by hand with the help of tools—outside of some very rare 3D printing, even phrased pipes are often just turned from templates and then still heavily worked by hand once they come off the machine. There’s many ways to copy a shape or work from a template, and trust me when I say the time one might be saving only matters when they’re making a lot of pipes (factories).
The real distinction here is preform stems vs. hand-cut. High quality preform stems can be made amazing by the hands of a master who is going to work them for comfort (they really are saving time on the tenon part, since they can cut the mortise to a standard size every time assuming they’re using consistent preform stems). Hand-cut stems are a huge pain and that’s a lot of what you’re paying for with Dunhill, Castello, and up.
Of course, some people make terrible hand-cut stems, so it’s not always a sign of quality or value.
Former’s decision to shape these little Apples from a template is based on one thing: consistency. He’s an amazing pipe maker, one of the best , and that’s why he makes this look easy (since someone mentioned that they saw a video of him working). He could turn these entirely by eye/hand, but he’s worked for decades to improve his tooling and workshop, so why not keep things extremely consistent by using machinery intelligently? These are not “prefab” that he’s sourcing from somewhere else—they’re made by him in his shop from a template and still require a lot of painstaking work that has to be done by hand.
The truth is, it takes as much skill to produce the same shape over and over within very tight tolerances as it does to whip out a bunch of slightly different Apples. It saves cost and allows a wider segment of the market to own a piece of him; a piece of pipe making history.
And I know I’m not alone, but if you’re like me, it’s nice to have some “modest” high-end pipes for daily use/travel. I love other pipes for different reasons, but if I could only smoke one pipe for the rest of my life, the Former Rusticated Apple would be a serious contender.
There’s a reason these little Apples sell out instantly all the time, and rarely become available on the secondary market...
Oh, and aesthetics aside, it’s just a great size for me personally. I always tell folks they should buy pipes that appeal to them aesthetically, and if they know their preferences well enough, ones that are a practical size for them or for a certain application.