Ask me anything: Kontrol S-Series MK3

This simply isn't how things work. My attempts to help and explain bear no resemblance to playing the victim. I appreciate you're an early customer - that's fantastic. I'm dismayed you're having a bad experience and only trying to help.

There's an entire supply chain at play here. A tightly choreographed dance, that rarely goes wrong if everyone plays nice. That it's gone wrong here is incredibly frustrating to you, and also to us, as we're now chasing down illicit pre-sales shipments that our commercial agreements make abundantly clear were not supposed to happen. The rug of normal operating procedures was pulled from under us.

It is absolutely routine that hardware products build up inventory ahead of launch, ready to ship on day one, whilst the software and firmware is finalized, and then made available to customers, also on day one.

Truthfully: it's even worse. Based on the timing of this shipment, you have likely been sent a unit never intended for general sale, that we'll need to take back in order to provide you a new unit without issue. Please DM me and I can sort you out and make things right.

TL:DR if you're interested:

Inventory must first be shipped from source, for which there are typically two options, ocean and air freight. The former is very slow, but cost effective and more environmentally efficient. The latter is very fast, but extremely expensive (you're paying for convenience, and also the fuel to weight ratio). Mass production of the Kontrol S MK3 began in Tunisia and China over the summer, in order for ocean shipments to arrive on time.

Those shipments then arrive at distribution warehouses en masse, whereupon they're shipped to retailer warehouses weeks ahead of launch. This is to allow retailers time to prepare their own set of logistics, and ensure they've adequate stock from day one, so that they're able to sell and ship on from the day of launch. It is routine for a product launch that physical hardware inventory is shipped ahead of time.

When hardware is manufactured, it has factory firmware installed. This is known as Day Zero firmware. Again, this could be 3-4 months prior to launch, because of the aforementioned supply chain. During that time, we continue to improve the software and firmware stack, fixing bugs found in beta, as well as prepare to upload this software and firmware to native access, and enable the user-facing authorization flows. This is known as Day One firmware, as it's the first thing a user sees when they get their new product, register it, and are prompted to install it.

We're in between Day Zero and Day One. This is how hardware products work. You've been sent one before launch, without our knowledge. That is an issue. As I said, please DM me and we can figure out how to make it right.

For sure - that's also a perfectly valid user experience.

We ultimately thought removing the buttons, and instead doing the per channel thing was a better overall UX (pros and cons to each).

But to introduce long press is a great idea. I don't know if we currently track a timing increment on button press, but of course such things are possible. I'm going to bring this to the team as a suggestion.