The OP1 is a genius piece of design tbh. It is very flexible and powerful for its small size, and devices in its category were very rare when it first came out (it helped define the modern incarnation of that category).

It was pricy but still under the $1k mark - pretty standard for a piece of consumer creative gear.

The design made it extremely approachable, which means a ton of techie people who wouldn't be into music gear otherwise still wanted to grab one just to try it and who knows, maybe it'd turn them into musicians.

So yeah, fantastically designed piece of kit. Lots of respect to TE for having brought that into the world.

I think a lot of the frustration directed at TE more recently is due to the fact that that base equation around price/features/quality of the product, which was very good for the OP1, has only gotten worse for later products.

And the OP1 itself, despite being an almost 15 year old product, has gone up in price A LOT (and the 1f upgrades don't justify the bump).