Why use classmethod instead of staticmethod? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Yes, those two classes would do the same.

However, now imagine a subtype of that class:

class Bar (Foo):
    pass

Now calling Bar.create_new does something different. For the static method, you get a Foo. For the class method, you get a Bar.

So the important difference is that a class method gets the type passed as a parameter.