Their OP1 synth came out in like 2018 and was considered ridiculously overpriced at 800 dollars, it's now 1200 bucks. A slight revision model is 2k. They are just attempting to appeal to the Apple retard community.
Didn't it go up in price because one of the components stopped being made (the screen iirc) and they had to source it from another factory with dwindling stocks? Or something like that - that was the excuse they gave. It's a nifty little unit but nowhere near worth that money unless you got cash to burn. Most people who have one say they don't use it very much except for train journeys etc. etc.
I have a few TE bits and bobs. Pocket Operators anyway. The PO-33 K.O! microsampler is my favorite. You can do a lot with it and it's a lot of fun. But once you bought a few of them you realise they are fiddly and difficult to save your work on and synch up to other units, but they do sound good for the size. And they are much cheaper to take on the train. You too can be the virgin cowering PO-33 USER vs the swaggering OP1 USER chad.
Like all these pretentious design studios they have to fuck it up. They did a case for the pocket operators that had little icons on the pad buttons, like snare, clap, hat, kind of thing. But they stopped making them and now only provide fucking numbers. Thanks. Still haven't got a fucking clue which button to press. Then you erase all the good stuff you did fucking about and realise you had none of it saved. On most units you can't even save! Pretty nifty being able to send out an audio morse code signal though to transmit digital code to your computer to be able to load and save (on the ones that have it).
You think they are like 50/60/70 bucks and so aren't expensive, but after your third or fourth one you realise you could have bought a proper synth/drum machine/sampler with the money.
I'll admit to owning those and I do like them - you can do a very quick table top jam with a couple of those and a couple of korg volcas, but otherwise I pretty much agree with your assessment of them as a company.
On another note, I just bought 16GB of DDR-3 1600 RAM for my computer. I can't afford to buy a new system at the moment -- not the one I would like anyway -- and I don't have time to faff about with building one myself like I usually do. So I upgraded my SSD storage and RAM, and I'm then going to overclock the chip I've got which is a very good little overclocker. Got good cooling on it. Should be able to take it up about 400MHz easy, which is just about on the side of 'oh, this seems to be a bit faster now'.
I didn't go with brand name memory this time as Crucial and Kingston wanted about 160 quid iirc. This no name brand (which has good reviews) only cost me about 60 quid. And the 8GB upgrade was only marginally less than the 16GB -- 40 quid. So that gives me 24GB to play with now. I will use it up with sample libraries and whatnot. Maybe now my computer will stop crashing when I load nearly a hundred tabs of porn!