Just received the MK3 keyboard - Feedback

Everyone is different in this regard and almost all companies have some form of beta program and always have had which includes user feedback to the development team, so you can still have that. But sending an unstable release into the market causes much greater business risk for everyone and disruption to people that are dependent upon a system working correctly every week and can't be bothered with trying to troubleshoot problems that should have been corrected before releasing a product. Especially if that released product has problems and negative impacts with your installed base of operational software. That's definitely something the vendor should test and certify before releasing it to the public. No one wants to deal with that...unless they want to pay you to identify and help troubleshoot the problems.

I think there are a lot of misconceptions about Beta programs. A formal Beta program is the final step in the development process in preparation for release and is pretty tightly controlled in order to avoid "scope creep" on a product that is feature complete. In other words it's not about adding ANY functionality. It's about final stabilization and is typically done through highly committed and known high usage users.

That's very different from a "public" Beta or a "marketing" Beta which is to expose the product to open wide review and is less about stabilization than it is about customer awareness. Again those are all way too late in the process to make any kind of functional changes or improvements because that's the very end of the development cycle and any functional changes are exponentially harder to implement because of the possibility of impacting what are considered "stable" features.

Setting these kind of hard line expectations would probably limit the interest in participating in a public Beta, not to mention most people that sign up for public Beta programs aren't typically that committed to providing usable feedback reports on a consistent basis to the development team that will help them gauge how much the Beta was being used, the usage scenarios and the product's level of stability in high usage or complex scenarios. The value to the product is only as good as the commitment of the people in the program.

From my experience testing in general is the hardest and most complex portion of the development process.

Not necessarily. The amount of the current drawn may fluctuate depending on the mode (i.e. writing to flash may need more current than booting). If the software only checks the voltage at boot-up, it could as well be a problem lateron.

I had a similar issue where the firmware update kept failing. Eventually after trying all of the cables I could find, I managed to get the update installed by plugging a USB -C to USB A cable from the host port on the keyboard to a hub rather than straight into my Mac Pro. The firmware update worked but the keyboard was saying low power plug in a charger cable. Once the update was installed I just went back to the cable that came with the keyboard straight into the Mac and it worked.

Having said that the keyboard screen is crashing every time it connects to a Kontakt instrument at the moment so I might try a power cable (Why none supplied NI?!!). Seems very buggy to me at the moment though and the firmware update took a good 2 hours to finally figure out.

Finally managed to install and update my S88 MK3 firmware and the unit just keeps crashing. Rolled back to Kontakt 7.6.0 which is more stable in Logic but the keyboard itself just hangs and needs restarting. Doesn't even work when connected directly to Komplete Kontrol. You can touch the rotary knobs for a while and they give a value but don't allow you to change it. Then it hangs and none of the knobs work apart from the mod / pitch wheel. Going to try with a power cable attached and see off that makes a difference. Come on NI, sort it out!

I would probably end up in traction for a week! Yowtch!