Originally Posted by
katsup
Will this be your first bike or have you been riding awhile? If it's your first, it is difficult to get the right bike without riding experience and I'd suggest lowering your budget and saving the rest for a 2nd bike when you know what you want.
This is great advice.
Take it.
As for the original question, don't spend $1000 on a hybrid. Any hybrid.
The difference between a $500 hybrid and a $1000 hybrid are the component quality, mostly the drive train. You might get slightly nicer wheels on a $1000 hybrid, but I doubt most people would notice.
The thing is...when the drive train on the $500 bike wears out, you can get an all new drive train for like $150. I just did this. It's not an expensive upgrade. Since it's a hybrid you aren't likely to upgrade it to a really high end drive train that would cost more. You're likely to replace it with a 'bottom line name brand but better than the generic stock' drive train that came on the bike.
A hyrbid is a great bike choice for many kinds of riding, especially if you are doing multiple kinds of riding and only want one bike. I'm not trashing the whole hybrid genre. I have one. I ride it every day. I love it. I spent $650 on it. But I wouldn't have spent $1 more. I've had to do repairs, mostly from generic components that just wore out fast. But each repair is relatively cheap. (Not to mention your credit card may have a built in extended warranty that pays for some of those repair) And I'm still well under $1000 total spend after 3+ years.
There is nothing about the more expensive models of the same bike that I wish I had.