Even in the age of the internet there's a huge business in people basically taking a "normal" thing from another market and then rebadging it to release as an elevated thing.
Studio neat has a $231 tiny box cutter[2]. OLFA (A "professional" box cutter maker) sells a 2 pack of tiny box cutters that probably are 5x more ergonomic on account of being made to be used instead of to look nice on a website, for $10. [3]
The best version of a thing is likely whatever people who do it all day use. But you can totally make a market for consumers who want "fashionable" things but who don't really get the space.
Studio Neat is a big offender on this honestly... basically all of their stuff have "better" things at least at half the cost just available in random stationary stores. I'm all for wasting money on pens, but at least waste them on good pens!
[0]: https://teenage.engineering/products/po-80
[1]: https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200
[2]: https://www.studioneat.com/products/keen
[3]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/OLFA-Compact-Knife-Pieces-95B2...
I’m sure there’s a price at which the vinyl cutter is profitable.
But, like, https://teenage.engineering/store/field-desk
Or maybe the TP-7 is a better example.
They are obviously following the playbook from brands like Supreme. At least in part.
I imagine artists could sell a super-limited (i.e. 1 copy) live recording of a show the second it ends for a premium, especially if they kept the machine on stage and personally packaged and signed it.
No one is buying this for economy’s sake.
But now mixing is done digitally and playing with vinyl is a mostly lost art and it's trivial to put your own material together into audio files and mix it.
Where a band with no money might struggle to afford a $1000 minimum run somewhere else, they might be able to make beer money at a show with records made on one of these. Probably not "economical" in the machine may never pay for itself, but somebody rich buying one as a mechanism to promote musicians on a small scale probably makes sense to them.
I would buy a machine that makes new laserdiscs if it existed, and not because of any economical argument.
... aluminized paper for electric arc printers
... wax film thermal print head ribbon
... a re-inker for cloth typewriter ribbon (at least this one is straightforward to design and build myself some day)
... extra wide cloth matrix printer ribbon with 4 colors
... 1.9mm magnetic tape for exatron wafers
A record cutter has way more potential audience than any of those. They will sell every one they can even manage to make.
I've been worried this place has gotten eternal september'd full of redditors, AI bots, and low-IQ emotional mainstream political rants.
But then you swoop in here and remind me that it's still 2007 in Hackernews land: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Never change.
FWIW, You can get 100 records + jackets printed professionally for ~$10 a pop.
Gakken toy record cutter is low quality, but costs $160.
I wonder what this would cost. Surely it's impractical for personal use, as marketed.
My spouse bought one on a whim. The quality is ... quite bad. It's a tool for learning about how this works though! So it was a fun little activity. But it really is "just" what it is.
Maybe Teenage Engineering's toy that looks like is exactly the same tech is better. I have my doubts.
https://www.outofrage.net/post/review-henge-journey-to-voltu...
Damn I would buy this for 50 bucks.
I actually have a project that requires a bunch of custom vinyl, but I am guessing this is not economical.
Scrolled down
WTAF
I'm a total TE fanboi, I have the OP1F and OP-XY, they're everything I ever wanted and my MPC and Digitakt haven't be touched in months. And the Digitone Keys is unplugged propped against the bookshelf. It's extraordinary how addictive these two little synths are for making things happen.
The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome of what happens when you have a bunch of creative people who like - and can - do things that are new to them and make them new to others. It's no wonder they keep getting asked to do cool stuff like Panic's Playdate, Baidu's Raven, Nothing Smartphones and Headphones.
TE have retained this incredible playful vibe that has long drained from Sony and Apple.
I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.
"God, I'm good," thought the Rolex wearer as he glanced at his wrist.
Hipsters will buy anything that looks cool. But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.
It appears they’ll just rebrand a few record cutters and call it a product. TE always comes off as really low quality for the types of prices they charge.
The MPC Sample is 400$ and looks well built, the KO2 is 300$ and has faders falling off.
Roland has a few samplers in the same price range as well.