You many be surprised, but ball pens or even pencils are not really low-tech products. Their production needs precision equipment and cutting-edge supply chain. You can´t make a pencil in your basement.
side note: "caran d'ache" actually means pencil in Russian which in turn borrowed the name from Turkic, where cara(n) means black and ache is stone. The company is Swiss, but it was set up by a Russian cartoonist that fled the 1917 revolution, worked in Paris and settled in Switzerland inbetween the world wars.
Sure, pen and pencil factories may need complicated factory equipment to manufacture, but they are still extremely low tech products compared to computer chips and other silicon related components which are still evolving relatively fast compared to pen and pencil products. The related manufacturing process for chips is also a lot more complex and advanced compared to the manufacturing process for pens and pencils. It's still a poor comparison.
Actually, if I may, Caran d'Ache was the "nom de plume" of a French satirist, who died in 1909 (before the russian revolution), but the Swiss company was inspired by his name and his life, as he was one of the first to create what would become (sort of) newspaper comic strips.
side note: "caran d'ache" actually means pencil in Russian which in turn borrowed the name from Turkic, where cara(n) means black and ache is stone. The company is Swiss, but it was set up by a Russian cartoonist that fled the 1917 revolution, worked in Paris and settled in Switzerland inbetween the world wars.