There is something about most tangible, manufactured items that make them magical and of higher value once they are not longer being produced. When it comes to certain types of items like musical instruments, that "magical value" goes through the roof, vintage keyboards for example.
It won't really matter how well they hold up (musically I mean, not physically), they will still be desirable for nostalgic reasons. I've seen people selling their vintage gear like Jupiter-8 or Prophet V for example because they A/B'ed the Arturia plug-in side by side and found them indistinguishable (the plugin being of course easier to work with). Vince Clark, founder of Depeche Mode, Yaz and Erasure put most of his hardware gear up on eBay the moment soft-synths crossed the equality threshold, and he was known for having one of the best synth studios (partially underground bunker) in the industry.
I think software is already there, it's just that there is still something to be said about a hardware synth that is a self-contained instrument with no dependency on a DAW, PC or additional controller, and hardware synths that are no longer in production have a particular mystique. I'd love to have a Kawai K5 again -- not because it was really a great synth, its considered by many to be the most difficult synth to program ever created, and I never even thought the sound was all that great, but I have a lot of fond memories of music creation with it, so there's a nostalgia value there.
So, I'm not sure synths ever become obsolete until they physically stop working, or in the case of software just fall into the unsupported graveyard (Albino is an example of that which has come up before).
About tablets and there potential... To me the value there is strictly in the mobility of it (very important for some, less important for me). I see a tablet has having all the limitation of a laptop, except much worse. Airflow, thermal limitations and overall computing power do not put them in the league of the hardware I'm currently interested in as a primary means of music creation. But, when you're sitting in a hotel room bored or whatever, pulling out the tablet and tapping out a riff can be satisfying.
|