From a Serato mindset
The Vestax VCI series had the hotcue above jogs back in the days.
The Novation Twitch had the performance pad in the lower bit, but it had no jogs.
Denon DJ MC6000 MK2 had it above as well.
I think the Pioneer DDJ SX (MK1) popularized or standardized the lower bottom layout of todays controllers.
The Numark NS7 was quite popular too.
True. They will come with the XDJ-XZ2 for that overly cluttered view. And if you don’t want screens, the FLX10 is the one you’d want.
I’d still wait for a next iteration of a Prime4.
Not just Serato, Native instruments also adopted it.
From a purely ergonomic point of view, it seems silly having a ‘performance’ pad somewhere that requires reaching over other things to perform on, especially given the risk of what accidentally touching that other thing carries (jog wheel platters stopping the music).
Funnily enough my home setup has those pads above the mixer as I’m using a separate controller for them, but on an all in one I couldn’t think of anything worse. I do however quite like the REV7 and S series mixer style of having them above the faders.
Its all about perspective.
Turntablist may feel the same about pads below the jogs.
I’m guessing that’s the reasoning behind the mixer positioning of the pads on the Rev and S series, to suit turntablists.
I’m a wedding DJ who never wears a tux so I guess it’s not for me! : )
And I still don’t like them above the platter. Denon chose wisely.
One thing Pioneer is better in 2023, is to use some high quality ESS dac, Denon with their Prime 4 don’t have a good reputation of using high end audio output
It’s scary to think there will now be a more expensive XZ2. Probably 3499? Maybe 3999
Apparently there is a $7000 unit comin …so brace yourself
Surely not? Even Pioneer can’t be that daft, actually nevermind they can can’t they 
Wow, hold Your horses here. Prime 4 sounds worse than Pioneer? Well, maybe (I can’t test that), but definitely no pioneer deck sounds better than SC series players… make couple of blind tests to check for Yourself. I was amazed how even old DNS3700 sounds waaay better than CDJ3000 today!
Come on then… links, evidence ?
That’s the problem with you young whippersnappers, ye ain’t wearing a suit when ya DJ.
I do, it just happens to be made by Fred Perry and looks a lot like a polo shirt 
Careful, you’ll wake up retro-made-up-graph-man.
Exactly. I’m not a groomsman and it ain’t a funeral (debatable, I know lol). Absolutely no one has ever had a problem with it. I still am clean shaven and neat. If you do a great job and give them an amazing night you’d be surprised how far that’ll getcha : ) I didn’t become a DJ to wear a suit. Don’t get me started. 
Hehe, I wish I was young again…
Meh. I still suspect Pioneer moved increasingly over to ESS because of the AKM fire. Even when my hearing was any good, like back when I was the only one in the room able to repeatedly blind identify Thiel’s experimental charged dielectric unbalanced interconnect cables the size of a fire hose with a power supply the size of a car battery (may have actually been a car battery, now that I think of it) in & out of the path or when Burmester was activating & deactivated their upsampling algorithm used in Ferraris (there were witnesses to both blinded listening sessions), I doubt I’d have been able to hear a difference between a Sabre and a Velvet DAC with my freaky golden hearing. This latest stuff measures amazingly and is incredibly sophisticated compared to even a decade ago. Who knows, though. I certainly couldn’t now.
I also really liked some little cheap Burr Browns (now TI) old Denon used to use. I don’t think the old Wolfsons used on the oldest CDJs even sound that bad. I think at least as much of it is the opamps, caps, power supply, and associated circuitry isolation contributing to the sound of even gear with reference digital processing. 99% of the character of the Prime systems’ sound is definitely not attributable to anything in their analog output section, and there’s nothing preventing any of you from hooking the X18xx line of mixers to any outboard DACs you want. I suppose the tone of the analog outputs is a more important issue with the all-in-one units that lack a digital output, but people should be harping more about Prime’s audio processing firmware code than its DAC stages.
All the pre-CDJ3000 Pioneer players with digital outs that I’ve tested were bit-perfect transports when the pitch fader is at zero and you’re not doing some weird sampling thing of a track that’s not loaded that some of the later models allowed. With keylock off, at zero pitch, or with keylock on & slightly in a positive pitch, the old Denons were pretty comparable to the old Pioneers’ processing. The CDJ3000 uses more convoluted processing than their old players and definitely upsamples now, but seems to have more fidelity in most situations than the Prime playback that seems to be using more computationally efficient resampling and anti-aliasing filters. For certain, Prime playback has more rolled off treble and more intermodulation distortion (aliasing echo?) at zero pitch than pre-CDJ3000 Pioneer players.
Slander.
It looks like a March 7th 2023 release date.
It would seem Pioneer Dj is pushing consoles out like babies.
What ever happened to the chip shortage?? 
