This reads like a promo piece for Teenage Engineering. The credit for the mini-synth revolution really belongs to Tatsuya Takahashi, the designer of Korg's groundbreaking Volca instruments. His Monotron synth was launched nearly five years before Teenage Engineering launched the Pocket Operator series. The Monotron is pocket-sized, fully analog, is musically useful and is supplied with a complete schematic; this last feature sparked a renaissance of circuit-bending and modding.

This does read like a pure PR piece. TE angered most of its fanbase by increasing the price of the OP-1 after it claimed parts became more expensive due to a new supplier.

The OP-1 is the only device I truly love and want to own but never will. I'm still pissed TE sent out an email after an OP-1 sold for something like $10,000+ on eBay saying "don't worry, we're working on making this affordable, stay tuned" then they announced a price hike! For a 10 year old product that's constantly back ordered!

notJim

Or you could let go of that anger you're holding on to and buy a used one for $1000 :) https://reverb.com/p/teenage-engineering-op-1

eggy

Or not, since if something fails you have to ship it to TE and pay them IIRC $125 to look at it. I bought and own an OP-1, that still works great, however, the sequence you execute on boot up to get numbered list of options, such as update firmware, or factory reset cannot be reached. So now I am stuck with the last time I upgraded the firmware, and I can't get it back to the original state, so I can mess around with it again. I don't know, but to spend $800 on a synth, and have to ship it to Sweden, and pay that large a fee to simply look at it is a bit much. I then tried to simply buy a new board, so I could pop it in and be done, but they were sold out! I am sticking with Orca [1] and Extempore [2] for now.

[1] https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca [2] https://github.com/digego/extempore