My music making has been mostly limited to physically playing drums and guitar for quite some time now, because after a long day working at the computer, I don't want to be firing up the DAW.
I recently got an MPC One Plus, as it works in standalone mode. No computer needed. (Though the workflow is still quite screen oriented.)
I took advantage of the lower second hand prices, now that there is a new MPC One gen 2 out.
Then a few days ago I discovered that there is a whole jailbreak culture around 1st gen MPCs and a project to port VSTs to the MPC. (The MPC is basically a linux box and it has a wrapper for linux VSTs built into it.)
So I managed to enable SSH in my MPC, by patching the most recent 3.9.1 firmware, and install quite a few plugins from https://github.com/sd88me/mpc-vst-plugins
It's great to be able to take more control of the hardware you own. Only downside is that a lot of the community plugin culture seems heavily claude dependent. I guess we could mark that as a potential benefit of AI coding? Allowing us to take control of hardware we actually bought and own. Making lock-out more difficult to enforce.
Of course I'm not forgetting about the negatives – the environmental impact, the job losses. The threat of human annihilation. Etc.