What bothers me is that I would absolutely buy this if it was bigger and had 1/4" balanced or stereo TRRS inputs, I actually have a variety of input sources in my home office that gets dual use for work, gaming, and music. But to use this I would need to go XLR to 3.5mm (and no phantom power?) for my voice and amp mics, main out to a Y split 1/4 TRS for speakers, and 1/4" to 3.5mm for a synth. So my desk would be littered with annoying adaptors just to slim down the inputs to fit in those teeny jacks.
A built in channel strip that I can keep setup for my mic (gate, compressor, EQ), plus a metronome for practicing, easy connectivity to my tablet to record myself a bit? Absolutely worth it.
There are lots of desktop mixers with regular-size connectors available, some with audio interfaces and effects. This one is super small and based on mini jacks - that's its differentiator.
Main difference from the similar-space BlueBox seems to be having little faders instead of a touchscreen. And it's twice the price. Design looks nice, hard to evaluate the usability from pictures. Menu diving on little screens can be rough.
My apogee duet sucked. Always had problems being recognized by logic and eventually they stopped providing updates to the software. Got a Motu M4 which is much cheaper and has been worlds better.
That sucks. I had the opposite experience, for those curious. I still have my firewire duet, I’ve been using over 10 years. Works great. It is unfortunate they stopped updating the software. My 2010 mac mini is running OS 10.11, and it works.
A built in channel strip that I can keep setup for my mic (gate, compressor, EQ), plus a metronome for practicing, easy connectivity to my tablet to record myself a bit? Absolutely worth it.
The synth part is a little dumb, but it's TE.