>Even as a paying Bitwig subscriber, I don't get it. My instruments are velocity and aftertouch sensitive
So what? You can get an idea down without either. It's not about making the final performance (though you can also program the DAW piano-roll this way just fine too).
>And then if you want to plug in hardware, you have to either settle for one thing and no charging or buy a dongle.
God forbid you have to buy a $20 dongle, or like, just use the device without one, and enjoy merely 10 hours of use instead of 15.
I bring up Bitwig because it was originally made as a touch-enabled DAW. I daily-drive it on a laptop with a touchscreen, and used to even have it configured to run on my Surface Pro. Despite all this, the touchscreen was never really intended as a performance surface. If you look at how Bitwig (or even the new Logic) is designed, this is obvious: the portion of the screen reserved for performance is minuscule. Touchscreen devices are outclassed in expression by cheap XY pads with aftertouch sensitivity. Everyone, Apple included, knows people are not going to use this as a touchscreen MPC. Akai's touchscreen MPC does not rely on a touchscreen for expression.
> God forbid you have to buy a $20 dongle
God forbid the iPad ever exposes a second USB port worth of IO bandwidth.
Actually, I take it back. Knowing Apple, I'll get my wish fulfilled with 2 Lightning ports and some MFi cable DRM...
So what? You can get an idea down without either. It's not about making the final performance (though you can also program the DAW piano-roll this way just fine too).
>And then if you want to plug in hardware, you have to either settle for one thing and no charging or buy a dongle.
God forbid you have to buy a $20 dongle, or like, just use the device without one, and enjoy merely 10 hours of use instead of 15.