Teenage Engineering's Real Product Was Always the Company

Teenage Engineering has opened a department store on Lafayette Street, and its founder has just said he plans to stop making synthesizers. Read together the two things are not a contradiction, they are the same argument: a shop whose main attraction is a production line where you build the sampler yourself is not selling the sampler, and for twenty years the company has made objects whose point was that the object is not the point. The piece also sets out, carefully, how one founder's stated intention became a discontinuation notice in the trade press inside twenty-four hours.