Maschine Hardware

NI annoy me with their lack of updates and transparency but this move seems fairly understandable. The HW you are talking about will still work, its not just going to break, its just no longer going to recieve upgrades. To be fair, NI has supported Mk1 and MkII for around 14 years now. I have never seen Apple support an Iphone that long, have you? Its the nature of the beast, if they had just put out support for 3 or 4 years then yes I would agree with you but both have had a decade plus of upgrades and support which seems fair and like I say, they will still work,you will still be able to use them as you always have to make music, they will still work with the expansions you have, they just wont recieve support going forward.

Look at it this way, the Akai MPC5000 came out just one year before Maschine, when was the last time Akai updated it? NI only just announced stopping support for HW almost the same age as that MPC just the other day.

it seems you guys don’t want to see the reality of things: the market is not what it used to be.

Back in the days, you used to buy a product and have it IN OUR HANDS. Installers, activation codes,… everything you need. In THIS case (and only THIS), you would be right: everything would work as before, just no updates.

But maybe you didn’t notice how things work now. They created a system that keeps you DEPENDENT from them. It’s enough they decide to remove something from Native Access and your ability to install it, authorize it and use it will be gone.

Maybe you are so lucky to not be around from enough to have many NI products that you can’t use anymore. The exact same rhetoric of “it’s not that it won’t work anymore. You can still use it as before, just no updates” has already been used many times. But…try to go down the rabbit hole and see what happens if you want to use your Kore, Guitar Rig Kontrol, or one of the many abandoned software…

You guys seems to analyze the things without any knowledge of what happened before. And to accept everything because “this is how things goes now”… Well…some of us don’t agree: if we bought Guitar Rig 3 with a Guitar Rig Kontrol and the things they do are more than enough for us, we want to be able to still use it (in the end, this is what we paid for: to USE IT). It’s our business if to use it we accept to still be on Windows 95. It should not be a decision taken by the company that cashed the money.

To conclude: all the things you say could be right…IF ONLY NI would be correct enough to say “we don’t want to develop/support this product anymore. Here are the installation files and activation codes for all the customers that bought it, so they can still use it”.

But the reality of things is another one: instead of putting efforts in giving us new products/features so valid that will CONVINCE us to update/upgrade, they prefer to try to FORCE us to follow them by making things really difficult for the ones that don’t want/don’t need/can’t afford to buy something new (maybe just because they are already happy with what they have…a concept the industry has been so able to cancel: “you NEED the new and shiny thing…no matter if it offers little or nothing more: IT’S SHINY!”)

BTW…just to let you know: at the beginning of this year, they already decided and announced that old NA1 will be retired at the beginning of next year. Decision taken no matter the state of the problematic, malfunctioning and definitely not ready NA2.

Are you sure you will still be able to authorize the products you bought and use? Or that after a little while they won’t remove them? Because…you know…they must sell Alicia’s Electric keys now…so…your copy of Scarbee Vintage keys could be a hindrance for their plans…

It could also be a UX decision. They stated they couldn't implement live slicing on the mk3 mikro because they couldn't create a user experience they liked. Maybe they feel changes coming with maschine 3 will make the UX on the old controllers too poor for their standards.

Or maybe they have data showing too few use the old devices to warrant spending dev resources on keeping compatibility.

Hmm; I wonder if "no longer supported" means they're also being removed from the controller editor. That would be nuclear.

back in the day I was using a Apple g4 and a early version of cubase 1.6 but for me to use a newer version of cubase i.e 4 , 5 years later , I had to buy a new computer .
as already mentioned in the various threads about this topic , you can still use your mk1/ mk2 with maschine v2 and if you’re on windows you’ll probably be ok for a few more years , if you’re on mac , you’ll probably have to avoid updating your os .
do you think polyend etc are gonna be updating the tracker in 15 years , or elektron are gonna be updating overbridge to work with 15 year old products

I'm sure I've mentioned it here previously; but I completely ignored maschine when first released because of this "issue". Mk3 people are going to be in the same position sooner or later. It's not "if". It's "when".

M+ is tricky. It shouldn't be in this position because the functionality is built into the device. Maybe you lose the option of using it with a computer, but you still have standalone. That said; it prompted me to log in before I could use it. If I have to reset my device 20 years from now and it's a brick because they've taken down activation servers… "mad" isn't strong enough to describe what I'd feel.

I remember feeling iffy about M+ when I first set it up, but I don't remember exactly why. I decided to reset it to test. It prompted me to setup wifi. Then go to an NI site to enter a code and sign in. I vaguely remember it asking me to enter my password last time; but this is better. However, you can't cancel it. The device is a brick until "activated". It would be one thing if this is just a gate in place to access their little sample packs; but it's a gate that stops any use of the device completely. If NI gets sold off to behringer or something and I have to reset this thing later… Yeah; now I remember why I was considering returning it immediately. I'm mad just thinking about it.

Funny enough; it prompted me to register after that - and failed several times. It gave a 'workaround' of visiting https://ni.de/register, but that page was throwing an error and wouldn't even load. lol. It seems their URL shortener service might have been having temporary hiccups while I was testing.