This trio of Hand Wound Tomatillo single-coil pickups share the same lineage as our Ancho Poblano and El Diablo pickups. Clean-sounding, with plenty of chime, the Tomatillo pickups are crafted around alnico 2 magnets, simulating what an aged alnico 5 pickup from the ‘50s might sound like today.
The idea that AlNiCo 2 simulates aged AlNiCo 5 is wrong on two counts, first it's a different formulation of metal all together, it delivers a different permeability, inductance and Q factor in a given pickup. Second, there is no reason a fully charged AlNiCo 5 magnet should lose half it's charge over the course of 60 years. Fully charged AlNiCo 5 is rather stable. It can become demagnetized in a few different ways, but it would take a lot more than sixty years for time alone to deplete AlNiCo 5 to the degree that it has equivalent strength of AlNiCo 2.
In the video, Mike Lewis says that when the wire is guided onto the bobbin by hand "you get a very charming sound with a lot of character, because of all the little inconsistencies that come from doing it by hand.. each one will have it's own mojo". He actually used the word "mojo". "We call them tomatillo because they have a very sweet flavor, yet a tanginess to them". "charming", "character", "sweet", "tangy" none of those are adjectives that describe tone. I can't say something sounds one of those things, and you think "yes, I know exactly what you're talking about". IMO, this is worse than misleading, this is deceptive marketing, because even though he uses subjective, non falsifiable adjective like a good salesman will, the suggest itself that hand guiding makes a pickup sound
any different is not substantiated in any way whatsoever.
It's true that a pickup that is hand guided shows some peculiarities, but the thing is, even some machine wound pickups show the same signatures, because wire that fine never lays perfectly neatly on a bobbin that wide. What happens is you get second, third, fourth resonant peaks way beyond the primary resonant peak at frequencies from 50kHz to 150Hz and probably beyond, but you never hear those resonances audibly because they are waaaay beyond both human hearing and the operation range of guitar rigs. The point being that the effect of sloppy coil winding has a predictable and observable outcome, it's not a shadow in which sweet and tangy tone can be found hiding.
Fender apparently sees boutique winders doing well selling mojo and they want a piece of the pie, but Fender is not being nearly as subtle, they're shoveling the BS hard.