That's heart breaking. There's such a huge comeback for these. They've been really popular recently. I tried to find a robot and the rhythm to add and replace some broken ones. it's too bad third party companies are scalping customers.
Picked up the Speak from Amazon, street fighter from B&H in NYC, Tonic from perfect circuit in cali and the KO from teenage engineering… All in the last two weeks… The only other one I see out there currently is the mega man… everything else marketed up and used… Sad to hear they are going out of print… such fun tech…
They have restocks coming between may and June. They literally just restocked the P.O.33 everywhere at $99. The third man records version is also available currently at that price. Nobody paid the asking price of $300 for any of them, maybe the Rick and morty but that one sells for $200. Pricing is spot on though. Just hold out for a deal.
I got 5 PO's. They all broke. Some even made the batteries too hot to touch. I've tried contacting them several times, I got nothing. The only one that didn't break is the PO-20. Really not recommanded. TE I feel is digging themselves into a whole and soon, they won't be able to get out.
I know when I first heard the rumor, I jumped to buy the Megaman. I got lucky to find one on reverb for normal MSRP. It was on my amazon wish/storage list for quite some time, I'm glad I didn't have to over pay, but some of those prices were insane!
I would like to ad that the original cases are really bad! A tiny lunchbox is the best thing to carry it around. Use kitchen sponges to stop it from bouncing around in the box
Yeah I don't like the original cases either, buttons are too hard to push reliably. I prefer the after market ones. Not gonna lie, I did but the luxury MPC style one, and the buttons work very well, but I can see the cheaper hard cases and clacky button versions working well too and came very close to buying some, otherwise I like using it raw!
The original cases suck. The only way to make them halfway playable is to cut halfway around the button so it isn't so stiff to press. I guess you might not notice it if you don't do a lot of live playing into the PO. Or live playing in general.
The original cases also require you to break off the top hanging tab of the PO to fit it in the case. For something like the Street Fighter and Mega Man especially, this is a deal breaker.
Can´t wait to see the Pocket Operators FIELD, the ones with displays that will not crash when falling on the ground or starred at to long :D Thanks for your video, I noticed some very high prices on some POs and thought WTH
they literally were my gateway. i always dreamed of making music, but ADD made it basically impossible to learn a DAW. These helped me so much, especially with how to lay down a drum pattern. At the 'old' age of 26 too. Now i can use ableton pretty well. I prefer my Dirtywave M8 though for the same reasons i loved the POs.
Got a barely used PO-33 from a guy who just couldn't get into the workflow for $50 incl. shipping. Even if I had paid for shipping it would've felt like a fair price for a used PO.
Anyone having trouble with the 3.5mm jacks ? My KO's 'OUT'' only works now plugged in, ie, unplugged and it thinks it's still plugged in and won't access the internal speaker anymore.
Been trying to find an Office to weeks, without any result :( Perhaps due to the global chip shortage, TE is putting their focus on their more expensive crap which has a higher profit margins than these beloved little devices. It also wouldn't surprise me they did this on purpose as a marketing stunt, creating extra attention within the community to these devices and raising their prices, before pumping them out again at increased prices. It would be strange, and a real pity to abandon a product that still today has a big demand and basically has no competitors in its very niche market. The closest thing they could compare to are perhaps Volca's, though more limited, there's just a unique feel and experience using any of the PO's. Wonder where TE will take this, anything is possible from this wacky company.
yeah I was afraid of that .. I even tried tweeting at teenage engineering on twitter.. no response .. I only recently got the PO-33 for ~ $100 ... can't seem to find *anything* else new whatsoever..such a shame
i was looking for a P.O but couldn't find any that were not crazy overpriced. ended up getting a volca drum. kind of happy i couldn't get one since i am loving the volca!
The PO's are still in stock in Europe for the normal price. That being said I would not spend a dime on any of them. They all look like near future electrical waste to me. Power to those who got something good out of them, Free Beat being a very good example.
I think, the next step from this video, is to start calling out sellers that are asking crazy exorbitant numbers, and to also share sellers that are the go-to people.
It depends on why you need them. For making music, they're probably not worth it. But as collectibles... They're all cute and you can't stop buying them :)
Thank you very much. Free Beat for those wise advices. I thought there were only delayed by chip/component supply like many other things. The PO are still listed in all major UK music gear suppliers.
Even though I love the pocket operators I can’t support this company anymore after the products and direction they have went the last few years as a company . And the ghost 👻 edition po33 or the Kyle beats po 33 looks like all they selling these days in limited amounts .
I didn't really vibe with many them. I owned all of them (except the Office and Speak) and sold all of them, except the Tonic and PO-33. I also have a broken Robot. Get the OP-Z or an MC-101 instead. So much more capability.
Could this be due to the chip shortage? Maybe they can't make them at the moment. Actually it's an interesting question as to who does actually make them. Presumably TE just design them and they are physically made in China or somewhere. But it could be supply chain issues.
They are still available from TE on their main website throughout Europe, so I don’t expect that they would be discontinued. Also I can’t see how it would make sense business wise to discontinue a cash cow like the PO line as they don’t even need to advertise and they sell. Maybe they are focusing on production of their other lines and they lack cash for production of the PO line at the moment.
Great video, pretty much covered anything I would have added to the discussion as well. Used prices are creeping into the range of stuff like the Sonicware Liven series, Volcas, Monologue, or even Model:Samples. Pocket Operators are great for dicking around and sketching ideas when you can get them for dirt cheap, but it's a hard sell when they're brushing shoulders with some of the big boys in music production, when comparing everything from feature set to build quality. I'm seeing a PO-32 Tonic on reverb for $175 atm, and sometimes you can find used digitakts for around $600. Like, putting it that way, at almost 1/3 the price, can you really say the PO-32 is 1/3 the machine that the Digitakt is? It's ridiculous.
That's how marketing works....Hope they don't, much better gear around for the same money that will last years longer than these crappy things, they'll soon disappear when the next 'craze' hits the www....
I had four of them I bought all at once for $50 each. I immediately found them to be worthless, sadly. My issue with them was the audio signal coming out of them was so quiet I found them unusable. Just not loud enough to bother with. So I threw them in a box where they sat for 8 months. I sold them all this week for $100 each. I was glad to see them go. Tho I did like how they operated, too quiet, too fragile. Definitely not worth more than you said to pay.
@@Guacamole1000 They are targeting people with too much money and not much brains also RU-vidrs who need this crap to make copy/paste afillitate linked BS Videos with similar titles.....Yawn....
Good idea, but you still have it backwards. A $10 discount is more justified than an equal markup. All gear is overpriced and manufacturers count on customers not doing due diligence to negotiate a lower price. I've decided that I'm not going to pay retail for any music gear. You've got 7 or 8 pocket operators and TE should sell you the next one for no more than $15 or $20. Musicians need to make mfc's justify their prices before justify ing the need to pay those prices.
Every piece of music gear that I own has been bought used and I intend to keep it that way. Keeps the circular economy going and also produces less waste in the world (not to mention saves me money). Everyone should be using reverb, eBay, offerup, facebook marketplace for doing any purchases for music gear and electronics in general.
@@Guacamole1000 even so, if you automatically pay the asking price you're only doing the seller a favor. I prefer buying new products because I want the mfc warranty and the illusion of being first. But, I'll leverage my ability to live without against the market's desire to take me for a complete, complicit fool. Buyers have a say in the value of a product and to leave that decision to the seller is irresponsible.
@@tzodearf2596 To that I would also say I almost always negotiate the price, unless it's a price that is far cheaper than retail. For example, a purchase I made recently was an SP404mk2 on eBay for $440 free shipping that came with 4 extra 32gb SD cards and extra set of "fat" knobs. Retail price on an SP404mk2 is $560 new (plus tax). The unit was in the box in essentially brand new condition. I saved over $100 and got extra stuff, I feel like there's really no way to argue that that's a bad thing. I agree not having a manufacturer's warranty can sometimes seem scary but I'm not buying things that are worth significant amounts of money anyway. To give an arbitrary number I would say over $1000 USD is when I would start considering the risk/benefit of buying used without a warranty. The most expensive thing I've ever bought used (aside from my car) was the M1 Macbook Air that I'm typing this comment on. Got it for $700, a large discount from retail price ($1000) and again it was in essentially new condition, and since it was within the first year of sale it still had the Apple basic warranty on it for a few months. But if you can't fathom the idea of using something that someone else (aside from the person who made it) has touched then yeah I guess it would be difficult to buy something used.
@@Guacamole1000 You obviously know how to negotiate and spot a good deal. I'm trying to encourage musicians to negotiate and stop letting mfcs and retailers holding us over barrels. Call me Don Quixote.
Teenage is a sketchy company. I don’t like companies that artificially create scarcity in their product line. Whatever, I downloaded koala for a couple of bucks and it’s better and on my phone. C u later teenagers
The difference is that apps/software like Koala require a better than average device (read:expensive) to properly operate on. So it's not that much of a bargain.
@@tonykellydjt2805 ya true, my iPhone 📱 costs nearly $1000. Having said that, there is no world 🌎 where I go leave me house without my iPhone. Therefore the portability aspect of po has limited value. I would gladly pay $80 for a new tonic, or a sub bass. I don’t enjoy buying anything used and refuse to do it except for my house which is full of thing that r old and need to replaced 😠😡😩. I guess this hits close to home for me as a detroiter. Here we do cars. As soon as chevy, ford or dodge has a hit on their hands 🙌, it’s put and deposit down, enter a lottery for the privilege of paying thousands over msrp. Harley Davison does it too. I understand that some runs sell out, u could only risk a run of 100k of units. Demand ended up being one million, u could not have known. But please let me get a new sub bass or tonic for a fair price new. Seeing auto companies treat the consumer poorly my whole life, I guess it hit a nerve. As Ringo would say, peace and love. Have an awsome day ☮️
The entire point of this video was to tell people that it's simply not worth it at that price in my opinion. I'm not trying to argue what they're going for lol.
Nope, doesn't work like that bud....You only pay what you want to pay....The last one I saw was offered to me for £18 and said no, junk disposable landfill toys....Got a DE7 here I paid £35 for but they all sell for over £50 so why didn't I pay over £50....See how it really works now bud....
Teenage Engineering reduced the price of the OP-1 Field by about 26%, from $1,999 to $1,488. I posted a comment here two days ago, talking about what I think is going on at TE; I believe they're experiencing cash flow problems. It's not that they want to discontinue the PO series, they just can't afford to do a run of all the POs while supporting their new product lines. TE has miscalculated the success of their new high end product lines strategy. If TE goes under, the PO series will be done. It will be interesting to see what happens over at TE in the next couple of months. One things is for sure, the people who bought the OP-1 Field at full price are going to be PO'd
