Well, I think you have to make a difference between cell-phone manufacturers, who sell in unit numbers tens of thousands of times greater than the keyboard market. Innovation has to be payed for, but we want technically more advanced products at prices way LESS than their predecessors, and we want it NOW

We are, sad to say, a TINY, TINY market. What did I hear one time? That the ENTIRE keyboard market worldwide has about the same yearly gross as ONE Walmart..!

The problem, as I see it, is that we often waste valuable time criticizing arrangers for non-current peripherals that WORK. Just because an arranger uses an older PCMCIA slot, and you need to put Compact Flash cards in them to work, rather than the latest SDHD cards, as long as it WORKS (and the cards are still available... which they are), what does it matter? If your arranger ONLY has USB1, but it has no significant need for USB2, except to save you a few seconds off of doing the same function with USB1, what does it matter?

I can see that there ARE many things that could be improved on Yamaha's, and to be honest, those improvements exist on other manufacturer arrangers. If they are THAT important to you, go buy something else But bottom line is, we don't buy arrangers for the peripherals, we buy them for the SOUND, and for the STYLES. Everything else is secondary.

Were this a multi-billion dollar industry like the cell phone industry (and unit prices were in the low hundreds of dollars, not several thousands), you WOULD see a technology turnover at their pace. But when we are a tiny, tiny market, you can't expect that pace of change, realistically...