I'm cancelling my preorder as well. I'm pretty confident that Ableton will figure out the hardware issues, take care of people with defective units etc.
The problem for me is simple, Push 3 is not really capable in stand alone of writing an entire song, you can set up a bunch of loops in Session and that's really it. Push 3 stand alone when used to start a song cannot use but one time signature. P3 SA has no Follow Actions, no Arrangement View and no way to edit an arrangement. Everything else aside, this means that P3 SA is not going to help you finish songs. You can write more starts of songs, and more unfinished Session View arrangements. I see no benefit to this in my case and IMO in most peoples cases. I travel quite a bit, so an all in one hardware device is appealing, last month setting up Push 2, a laptop, another controller and an audio interface in hotel rooms and on the jobs is not ideal, awkward at best. So I was super excited about P3 SA, then the limitations just killed that excitement.
It's absolutely fair to compare P3 SA to the other two software and hardware stand alone devices out before it, Maschine + and the MPC Live etc. Push 3 stand alone has all the same issues as Maschine + and more, I'm pretty sure Maschine + can use the song arranger for instance. The MPC line up frankly just beats the snot out of P3 SA right now, there's not even a slight challenge in terms of songwriting to be had. Multiple time signatures and tempos, a mature song mode, touch screens for editing MIDI or even entering notes, and the battery isn't sucked dry in minutes. The included instruments are good enough, I end up writing more with samples on it since that's it's strong point. Seriously unless you're just tied to the Ableton ecosystem, need MPE and can't stand the MPC sequencer etc. it's a no brainer which one is going to get work done. I canceled my pre order (which is still not cancelled after emailing and chatting with support
), and bought an MPC Live II Retro Edition, it's great and significantly cheaper than stand alone.
Basically I see not a single benefit from the stand alone software right now. it's never ever been a challenge for me or I would say anyone really, to write a nice loop in Live, with or without Push. It's always more of a challenge to actually finish a song, and if it's not possible in stand alone, then IMO it's not doing much to help the creative process. The other elephant in the room, Ableton were generous enough and eco friendly enough to offer the option for the future of upgraded computer components for stand alone. This is a really cool, and IMO in a couple years a lot of the issues I have with stand alone being an unfinished song loop machine creator will be solved, along with the hardware and software bugs people have mentioned. So a new upgrade for the internal computer will be out as well. People like me who do not need another loop creating device will have stuck through the early days of stand alone when it wasn't that great and "helped" Ableton to make it a mature device, and the reward will be years of loops created on an immature device OS to watch new buyers get much much faster computers. Oh and the option to upgrade for $1000.
So my advice is to wait a couple years. Ableton will probably eventually make stand alone capable of writing whole songs on, and you will get a much better CPU by the time they do.