Originally posted by Reciprocity has Pentax ever decided to relaunch a new ANALOG camera?
I note you use the word "ever". If they had decided to relaunch one in the past then we would have seen it, and we have not. The nearest thing to that was keeping the K1000 (technically a 1960s design) in production for years after its sell-by date.
As for a relaunch today (some people still clamour for the K1000) it won't happen. There has been a rumour about a new/relaunced Pentax film camera, fuelled by some YouTubers seeking clicks. But it is fake news that seems to been based on the Pentax publicity videos about the K3 iii, which happened to show some cameras from Pentax's venerable history.
There is no way Pentax will start making a film camera again. They are a small cash-strapped company (yes, I know, a division of Ricoh, but they still have to budget) that just could not afford the investement. You cannot just start making a K1000 (for example) again at the drop of a hat. New production lines would need to be set up, workers would need extensive training (those old cameras used a lot of hand assembly), and the subcontractors who supplied some of the parts (shutter, meter) would demand a large amouts of money to restart their production for an uncertain market, or more likely simply refuse to. An entirely new film camera, using otherwise modern tech and robotic assembly, would probably require even more investment up front.
And all this would be for the benefit of a tiny market (film cameras), within a shrinking camera market, in which the used sector is already vastly over-supplied for the demand - look at Ebay. A K1000 cost about £150 new in the UK in the mid 1980s, the equivalent of £550 today, but at the time the capital investement costs of the K1000 had long been recovered. I would be surprised if they could make new ones for less than £2000 today.
The undeniable revived interest in film cameras is partly rooted in the patina and antique quality of old film cameras, which a new one would lack. It is significant that Nikon discontinued their last film camera very recently. As someone else said, Leica might pull this off, but the Pentax name, sadly, is not sufficiently prestigious to do so these days, (nor are Canon. Fuji etc), even though we Pentaxians know that Pentax is hugely under-rated by outsiders.