Checkout Pocket Operators from Teenage Engineering if you haven't seen them already. Its a lovely (to me) line of physical synths that are quite inexpensive < $30 USD and also as a non-music person really got me started down a path of wanting to learn more.
POs were a bit too limited for me. The sequencer isn't powerful enough to make anything more complex than basic chiptunes.
Not to diss on PO. I was super hyped about it as well, and would have liked to know about its limitations before buying it. Anyone of the numerous phone apps would be a cheaper and better replacement for a PO.
What got me started in music was Garageband. It's free (for macos users) and quite simple and intuitive. It's not as fully-featured as something like Ableton, but quite capable for making professional-level songs.
It's pretty remarkable to see what people do with Garageband even on iPhones.
I bought an interface for my guitar ($20) and have played around with Garageband on my iPad and just playing with the amps is a lot of fun. It's a very low friction way to record myself playing while practicing and since I'm using headphones, I'm not irritating everybody around me with my terrible playing.
One complaint about Garageband (and Cubase - a copy of that came with my Yamaha amp), is the lack of tutorials for people like me. I'd love a start-to-finish tutorial for recording a toy song that includes recording my instrument on top of simple drums and maybe one or two other virtual instruments.
>There's a delay when trying to hit stop on any of the boxes.
That's per design. They don't stop arbitrarily, but at bar boundaries, so that they stay on rhythm. In other words, it's not a sample player pads, it's clip launch pads...
They all start and stop at the beginning of a measure so that it sounds natural/intentional no matter what you click on and when.