That's what I was going to recommend--why waste money on a HW wallet just to store bitcoin?  Assuming you're going to keep it long-term, it would be so much cheaper and probably more convenient to transfer your bitcoin to an Electrum wallet, write down or stamp the seed phrase into a piece of metal and keep it in a safe place.  You'd have to basically do the same thing with a HW wallet anyway, right?

Yeah, and if he wasn't ever interested in HW wallets before, it's entirely plausible that he's not that familiar with them.