I too would live in a pinterest-ready castle filled with toys but i dont have the stomach to rip off customers as shamelessly as TE is. The B&O of our generation.
Value has no objective correlate: it is a construct agreed upon by the seller and buyer.
"Overpriced," "rip-off," and their ilk seem to me ad hominem attacks by people who don't meet at "sold."
Isn’t what you’re describing more of a “market price” or something like that?
On the other you have marketing which without changing the item/product itself might change its (perceived) value.
But their customers know exactly what they are getting so it is not that.
But, people pay for it. They want the whittled down, inspiring experience without any of the effort or trouble. I sympathize with those people, but Teenage Engineering's products are like the Disney Star Wars hotel of audio equipment. It's a one-of-a-kind, pretty-looking, dumbed-down, expensive scam. Some people will defend it, and particularly affluent guests might even say it's worth the money. Undeniably though, much like every Disney park, TE's product line is built to fleece the customer.
I've got half a mind to chew Moog out for the same thing, but they have legitimate excuses for why their instruments can't be mass-produced. Teenage Engineering doesn't.
I could name a dozen grooveboxes that can be had for under $300 today, but it's all sorta besides the point. People want the OP-1 because it's what they see on YouTube, not because it makes music. Considering how long the product has stagnated, I see no reason that it should cost as much as it does today.
They've "productized" an instrument that shouldn't cost more than $200 to manufacture at their scale. I'm mostly mad at how consistently stupid their target audience is, not the fact that they exist.
Show it, then. (and btw "half as much" is significantly more than "under 300 dollars")
>but people will balk at it complaining that it doesn't have a cow animation like the OP-1 does.
Probably I will complain that it lacks synthesis, a multitrack recorder capable of making long tracks, an input for sampling, or something. (I agree the animations in TE stuff are silly though).
I posted some examples of cheap, shitty grooveboxes I would prefer to the OP-1 in another comment below. Understandably not all of them will be to everyone's liking, but all of them are cheaper than the OP-1 and easier for me to recommend to learning musicians.
- Novation Circuit
- Roland MC-101
- Korg Electribe
- Used Digitakt
- (God forbid) Teenage Engineering OP-Z
The list goes on but those are the big names. Again, I'm mostly fascinated that such a nothingburger company like TE can capture the hearts of rich people everywhere. Maybe it just goes to show that the most successful businesses aren't the ones with the best products, but with the most effective marketing and highest sex appeal.
This goes without saying.
Also, having owned/used over half of those on the list, none of them emulate the tape functionality, which is arguably the OP-1's killer feature in the same way that the sequencer is the OP-Z's.
I wouldn't say any of them would be an alternative.
I think OP-1 is overpriced because there is nothing like it. I mean a secondhand laptop with a 69$ daw such as Reaper can do more, an MPC is more complete. But people who see the appeal of the OP-1 probably already have a computer and a DAW so this is not what they are looking for. They want a toy to make music.
I am not in the market for such a thing but I guess it is not that overpriced if some people are willing to buy it at this price.
Close enough.
> And it lacks knobs and piano keys
Well you can get like a dozen of various sized synths for that price but you'd then complain it has too many knobs and keys
That's the rub. I have no interest in the TE stuff (or, for that matter, most other manufacturer's stuff), but what we can do on our hosts, these days, is amazing.
I remember using a Tascam recorder for our sessions, where you keep remixing tracks, until the hiss becomes your "signature sound."
Nowadays, you can have a 24-track, digital system on your handheld, for peanuts.
The same applies to the Star Wars hotel. It's not for you, nobody is holding a gun to your head making you stay there. For the people paying, it's worth it to them.
Or maybe it is, in which case the entire modern economy is a scam. Ok I see where this thread is going from here.
If your employer offered you a raise, would you turn it down because you don't want to fleece the customer?
There’s not a ton of rationality in music gear, people like what they like.
Nice guitar (aside brand tax) has actual cost to make it, plastic toy like OP-1 is very cheap in comparison.
Hell, it's probably cheaper to make than random ass $500 behringer synth, even at unit count
The point people are making here is that everything the OP-1 does can be achieved or surpassed with a couple of $10 apps and a low-end general purpose computing device.
I don't know if this is the right analogy. Some people want to pay for features _not_ to be included in stuff because they enjoy the simplicity.
There are phones that don't have a browser or let you download apps, for example. That's not a "scam", that's just marketing to people who want simplicity.
In the modern audio landscape I'd rather pick Sonos as an example of a rip-off. High price, closed ecosystem, and data collection through the cloud services.
Yet people buy their products in large quantities, for well over a decade... They are used by top tier artists and consumer alike, and are used on many hit songs.
If you think they're so overpriced, there should be a massive opportunity to undercut them and sell such quality for less. But no one has... Again, for well over a decade...
Maybe they understand products better than people that don't make products.
People buy what they want, not what you think they should.
Just like buying a smartphone is a more rational choice than buying a rotary dial phone (assuming you have no phone beforehand), is not that subjective and is incredibly dishonest to even pretend that is so, and also you evaded the main premise that it was being discussed, meaning that you can just undercut a product by creating a cheaper/better one, because with a lot of products the line of thinking is a lot more complicated than that, sometimes predictable but irrational, in the case of Goop is due being the first one to came up with the idea and to be related to a female celebrity (and with it all the celebrity worship attached in culture)
Sorry, human utility functions, which drive pricing, are subjective [1]. This is basic economics. Different actors have different values - if there were some mystical "rational" rule to drive prices, it would be the same for all people. That some people value different things differently would imply that what is rational for one person (thus they choose one ordering) must be irrational for another (since they choose a different ordering).
Some people buy Goop because it makes them happy. That is all that is needed. That you do not does not make their purchase irrational. That is a misguided way to judge them and their preferences.
>and its one of the reasons its prices tend to be more stable
No, it's the other way around - people ten to buy more of the foods that are priced stably since they can plan. Many foods are wildly unstably priced, and as such cannot be planned around, so are more niche.
And this happens not just in food, but pretty much every type of good.
>certainly the most basic ones (e.g. potatos).
Potatoes are historically more volatile in pricing compared to other food stuffs [2] (you can use the site to check lots of goods, put each in Excel, compute volatility). So your claims are contradicted by evidence.
> predictable but irrational
Define a rational purchase. Be sure to address individual utility functions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility
[2] https://www.in2013dollars.com/Potatoes/price-inflation#:~:te....