seems like they won´t replace it:
while i don´t really care about the wireless functionality, having a dead battery you can´t even remove sounds dangerous to me. maybe i´m wrong about that, could somebody that knows their stuff jump in? what will happen to the battery in say, 10-15 years, after which i finally perfected my seaboard skills. 
I’ve owned two Seaboard Blocks for over three years now, I use them frequently via Bluetooth and via USB3 cable. So far the battery life of both has been formidable, no issues at all and no letting off. I wonder how much and how long I’d have to use them to render the batteries useless, but my guess would be that by then, I’ll have moved on to the next thing 
My point is, at the cost per unit and the usage I get out of it, these little devices have been excellent purchases for me.
…i hardly doubt the hitech silicon surface and gel underneath would last more than a decade…and no real need for further experienced peoples opinion on this…
even cheapest phones still work fine once their battery is dead and forever unrechargeable, if u only leave them attached to their power supply from then on…
i’m no big fan of consumer wasteland, though…but round about a decade sounds good enough for me…
but i really need mpe expressiveness for an actual project…
so i made my mind up, will still keep the roli seaboard block order going, hoping for the best but switch for now to the only other alternative option out there…
in this case, i even had in my hands already once, on superbooth '18…
a sensel morph…another little game changer that can even go beyond mpe…can morph between different controler functionality purposes of all kind within a flip to just another silicon layout surface…not that much of a real music instrument substitute like the squishy roli’s but will do the job for now…and can become a pretty neat daw controler at any time, once the seaboard can finally take the super expressive music instrument job…
…hausland…if the day comes were u move on to the next big thing 
please let me know…i’d buy ur seaboard block right away and pay the price as brand new…
even in a few years from now…this damned little modular seabord is a thing, i don’t mind to have even three of them…
Well, according to the articles linked by @Rusty, and the Telegraph link in there they are in deep trouble. Apparently they have already raised $100M of investments capital, and then needed a $1.6M kickstarter to ship a product, which they haven’t managed to do. Already they are not current on their loans.
This doesn’t mean that the technology will disappear, but it does mean that some financial firm will own the IP and will presumably try to sell it and recover some of its losses. The JUCE sale was probably a similar step. Extracting some value from the original investment in order to lower risk and/or recoup some of the losses.
…yeah, i’m afraid so, too…
they were too innovative for their timing to hit a real market that’s only showing up these days now and for real…
and missed out on getting a copyright for the overall mpe technology early on…
even if the basics are nothing but lot’s of ordinary sensors right next to each other…
there would have been an option to cover this…
a classic epic fail in management…no matter how smart in first place…
but hey, let’s hope for the best, anyways…
even if i speak already in past tense about this great company…damn.
their product design IS so sexy and straight forward…
$100M is a lot of money.
I suspect some venture capital idiocy is a factor here. There’s too much money sloshing around, looking for a home. They look at a company like Roli, see that they have some innovative tech and potential to grow, but completely overlook the fact they operate in a limited market. I think venture capitalists assume that EVERY business has the potential to grow infinitely. Like, your company that specialises in heritage garden seeds could be the next Amazon! if you pump enough money into it! Don’t worry about how many people actually can or want to garden, that’s loser thinking! Grow grow grow!
VC assumes the majority of ventures will fail. You bet on enough of a return from the ones that succeed (in a short term sense, usually only as far as an exit or IPO) to more than make up for the losses. It also tends towards market-disruptive concepts because those are the ones with hyper growth potential. There may be something about heritage garden seeds that completely changes how people behave and suddenly we’re all growing carrots and making tiktoks about gardening. I dunno. VC probably doesn’t know, but they’re going to find out.
…and meanwhile the hedge fonds bet on shorts…
gambling on chances that and when others are going to fail…
what a nice and fulfilling job…
off topic rant on modern society over and out…
the big shit show…to be continued…no matter what…
final side note and by the way…elektron also has quite some venture capital in their back since they started growing faster and faster recently…
£1.63m ~ US$2.25
Yep, someone at Roli must have had some super Power-Point skills to get investors to pony up that kind if money for a niche/novelty product. The good news here is that if the idea really is good and enough people want it the product will get made and the only real damage is that some wealthy speculators will lose a handy sum that they can easily afford to lose.
It’s easy to get cynical about capitalism at these junctures, but really, under any other system there just wouldn’t be any companies like Roli or Elektron for that matter. Try pitching P-Locks and Conditional Trigs to a panel of Swedish civil servants, hoping they start a groove-box division in the national musical instrument corporation. Better chances with the VC idiots 
This just brought back geist2 sadness… why did they abandon it so close to being finished. Was a genius piece of software marred by a few bad bad bugs 
I mostly agree… I think incoming money can ruin good companies though. Imagine if someone had noticed Leo Fender’s guitar company doing quite well in 1958, and offered him $100m – and then expected him to grow faster than the guitar market could absorb by manufacturing timbales, pianos, record players and agricultural machinery. I doubt the company would have lasted long. Or if they’d said, “Guitar sales are up 400% this year with rock’n’roll taking off! I guess we can assume that level of growth for the next 30 years, especially given that our 1970s space colonists will be looking for a hip hobby! Fender Corporation will be the biggest company in the world!”
Anyway, quite off-topic now, but I do think there’s a lot of stupid investment about.
All I’ve heard for the last year or two is doom and gloom which disappoints me because now that Live 11 will have MPE support I would absolutely KILL for a Seaboard Rise 25. I am very hesitant to buy second hand due to reports of poor QC and then poor support when something does fail.
The concept of using MPE to scan through samples and wavetables and the like dynamically is insanely appealing to me, I feel like the Seaboard’s potential as a almost kind of “West-Coast” interface for software has been buried by the constant focus on virtuosity. I don’t need to see any more people shred “guitar” solos on the thing you know? Their first product out of the gate was a $4k self contained instrument (SB GRAND) that was effectively out of production in 2 years.
Anyway, that’s my kind of $0.02. I hope they can get it together so I can have some squishy keys in my life.
$100 million for midi controllers?? And MPE controllers on top of that. Oh my head.
I remember playing on that first Seaboard at Musikmesse and I knew back than this was something golden. But I never understood why they didn’t went on developing musical instruments but instead went full on expensive controllers and advertising it as something for the hipsters that shop at the Apple store.
Let’s hope Expressive E learned from all this and their Osmose is going to be a big succes.
lmao its $1700
better, cheaper choices than Roli…Better reliability. The glue in the seaboards come loose over time on some units. Not all, but some.
Yeh I’m familiar with the reliability issues, hence my trepidation with buying used.
Problem is a massive fan of the interface as a whole, so I guess I’m just going to have to wait and see who does what next.
Every time I use it I’m at first thrilled, because it’s so good in so many ways, then disappointed, as the dreadful UI and bugginess starts to wear.
I tried using it to midi sequence a vst synth the other day. Can’t even rely on whether sequential notes will overlap, causing legato behaviour, or not. It was totally random.