I picked up my OT pretty recently, around the end of March, for about US $1150 and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything by not having the MKII (although I wish I had known I could wait a couple months and saved some money, it was a pretty major purchase for me). At the time used OTs in good shape seemed to go or around $950-$1050 and while I almost always buy used the price difference seemed to be worth it to have less wear on the buttons and encoders and faders in this case, on top of the older machines possibly having more likelihood of the headphone output flaw that seemed to be reported a lot before 2013 but not so often after that.
With the current used MKI prices I might be more tempted to go used, although the price difference between new and used still seems to be about the same. Personally the workflow has been mostly intuitive and quick for me, took a couple weeks to really get to where the basics felt totally automatic, and there are still a ton of tricks that I haven’t learned yet I’m sure, but for me the extra buttons really don’t seem like a big deal - convenient for live performance maybe, but not some kind of game changing improvement. The MKI shortcuts are all pretty intuitive when you get a feel for the overall workflow (cue+tempo for the metronome? Of course, you’re cuing the tempo, makes total sense to me when you think about it in terms of language rather than the other functions of the buttons; and most stuff is clearly labeled on the front panel).
I really can’t see anything about the MKII justifying the difference in cost vs a MKI now, other than the fact that apparently some of the parts are at end of life (including the old infinium fader, which is already out of production) so ten years from now it might be a bit harder to repair a MKI than a MKII. But if that’s a concern, it would still probably cost less to get a MKI and stock up on some replacement parts (maybe a screen, a fader, and a few switches and encoders) than to get a MKII.
Also I like the look of the MKI a lot better, but that’s just personal taste. I find the MKI kind of awkward and ugly from a design perspective, but in a charming, functional way. It kind of has the look of a prototype or an especially polished DIY project, but a lot of that turns out to be because the layout is geared toward ergonomics more than looks - in my experience at least, every button feels like it’s exactly where my hand naturally expects it to be, and it’s really PLAYABLE in a way that more “pretty” designs often aren’t. The new one is still ergonomic, and the visibility is probably better on stage, but something about it looks more like a gaming PC than an instrument to me. That’s purely superficial, though.
