Teenage Engineering says it will stop making synths, the OP-1 included

Teenage Engineering, the Swedish company whose OP-1 turned a small synthesizer into a design object people queue for, plans to stop making synthesizers altogether. Founder and CEO Jesper Kouthoofd told Highsnobiety that the OP-1 is no exception, even though it is the instrument that made the company’s name. If you own one of its devices, or were saving for one, some of the most coveted portable synths on the market now have an expiry date nobody has written down.

Kouthoofd frames the decision as a question of identity, not sales. “I’ve come to the conclusion that, for us, the products aren’t the business,” he told the magazine. “We can be so much more than that.” He went further a few lines later: “We shouldn’t make profits out of the products. The real value lies in the company as a whole.”

The plan, as reported by the music-gear site Gearnews, reaches across the catalog that built Teenage Engineering’s following: the OP-1, the OP-XY and the Pocket Operator series. Those devices sit at very different price points. The OP-XY costs around $2,300, which MusicTech has called notoriously pricey and which puts it in the same bracket as a high-end laptop. The Pocket Operators, by contrast, are calculator-sized boxes that made the brand an impulse buy for bedroom producers. Because music and audio hardware make up most of what the company sells, Engadget noted, quitting synths could mean it stops being a product maker in any conventional sense.

The company already has a second life as a design studio. It designed Panic’s Playdate handheld and the Rabbit R1 AI gadget, and has worked with Nothing and IKEA. Kouthoofd told Highsnobiety about a flat-pack plastic PC case he wanted to sell for $10 and then decided to give away free. The studio employs about 100 people and brings in roughly $46 million a year, according to the interview. “Some of this won’t be released for five to 10 years,” he said of a new project he believes will change life online.

What the interview does not contain is a roadmap. There is no end date, no list of which devices stop first and no word on firmware updates, spare parts or repairs for machines already in people’s studios. Teenage Engineering shared the Highsnobiety piece on its official Instagram but has not issued a separate statement, and Gearnews pointed out that the company’s habit of adding features to older devices through updates has been one of its strongest selling points. Whether that support survives a company that no longer wants to profit from hardware is the question owners on Reddit were already raising.

Kouthoofd has a clear view of who buys his instruments, and it is not working studios. “Ninety-nine percent of people who buy synths don’t use them as a productive tool for making music,” he said. “It’s therapy. It’s entertainment. It’s a hobby. That’s what the OP-1 is.” That audience of hobbyists is exactly the group with the least information about what comes next.

The timeline so far is thin. Kouthoofd says he told his staff he planned to stop making synthesizers during a reorganization in the autumn of 2025. Teenage Engineering was founded in Stockholm in 2005 and launched the OP-1 in 2011, and Highsnobiety published the interview on October 7, 2026. The company has not said when the last synth will ship.

Until it does, the OP-1 field and the OP-XY remain listed at music retailers, sold by a company whose founder has just told buyers that the products were never the point.

Tags: Jesper Kouthoofd, music technology, OP-1, OP-XY, Pocket Operator, synthesizers