YO! I never looked too much into the Maschine Mikro (I just assume spend a little extra dough for the Maschine if you're gonna buy something that you're gonna use for years). But I don't have many cons for the Maschine - it didn't have time stretch when I bought it but they just had a software update to include timestretch and I haven't had time to use it since the update lol. Otherwise it was mad easy to learn, I only been at it about 2 months, love the MPC and SP1200 filters you can put on drums and samples. Just watch some youtube videos man it's a real nice piece of hardware for the price. It comes with 10 or 20 gigs worth of sounds out of the box too and free software updates for life.