base2 

Well, I feel stupid. I just went to the bike room & counted 11 Powertap wheel sets, 2 sets of P1 pedals for/from a tandem, 1 trainer wheel for a dumb trainer, & a C1 kickin' around in a drawer. What more can be done? My only 2 non-Powertap touring/utility cycling bikes have Rohloff hubs & for obvious reasons those have Quarq DZero's.

Sad.

Sram could've done a lot. They could've bundled Zipp's in house. They could've made/licensed an SPD pedal version. They had the power to offer OEM bike or groupset options or custom in house build options, or different spoke hole drilling options to capture the wide variety of non-race or off-road or clyde applications a hub may be used in.

There is little choice but to believe SRAM just let Powertap as a brand flounder in attrition & obsolescence for the IP & to favor their own in house brands with the exceedingly high price point that I can only guess has a corrospondingly high margin.

Sram really has worked hard to un-earn my business.

Just for spite: Gevenalle for shifters. Fox for shocks. AbsoluteBlack for rings. Sunrace &/or Edco for cassettes depending on application. KMC for chains. Hope/I9/Phil for premium hubs. Sturmey Archer or Rohloff instead of Sachs, Son/Shutter Precision for dynamo hubs. Enve or Vision for high dollar carbon rims. Rotor/4iiii/Pioneer/Stages/SRM for power, Box derailleurs, Novatec for replacement freehubs...etc, etc, etc...All of which I gladly own over SRAM empire garbage.

Honestly, there isn't anything In the SRAM empire that can't be got elsewhere for an equal or cheaper price & be just as good if not a better product...& if you'll notice, I didn't even mention a Shimano product once.

Maybe SRAM needs to do some research & find out who their core retailcustomer is & what their brand reputation is. As for me? I think their products are disappointing disposable garbage & their business practices dishonest.

surak

We've been told by the only unbiased posters on BF that it's easy to make cyclists buy new tech, all you have to do is have the pros use it. So obviously along with 12sp, wireless, and 1x, everyone can't wait to ditch their old bikes and line up to upgrade their powermeters!

smashndash

https://cyclingtips.com/2021/02/here...ap-might-mean/

Maybe all hope is not lost

Psimet2001 

Didn't read the minutia but confirmed my belief that there was never an intent to do nothing with everything. Hopefully everyone caught the comment in there from Jim Meyer. They call him their "Category Manager for Digital Integration"... but he's the guy that invented the Quarq and built the company with his then wife Mieke - who used to come out here and post. A lot of old school guys here were a part of some initial testing and feedback on that product. I loved the early Quarq crew and got to know a lot of them. That attitude they had is still there with their personnel thankfully.

With Saris I never really got the impression they were super excited to keep moving in the power market. Who knows - maybe I misread them. being in the hands of the Quarq crew and Jim Meyer is a good thing for that tech IMHO.

Psimet2001 

I also have a room full of computrainers... things change. I went and looked at my build log and the last powertap I built was sometime last year and it was a rebuild on an existing powertap. Last time I ordered a new powertap for a build was in 2017 if I'm reading my records correctly. I had sold a handful of pedals for teams that had deals direct with Saris but in general it wasn't the hundreds of powertaps a year like in the beginning. The power market moved on. Kind of like the smart trainer market.

Chi_Z

powertab was popular early on because Quarq and SRM were like $1500+ and there were no single-side powermeter like Stages, once cheap crank based powermeter became available ppl realized how inconvenient locking yourself to one wheelset is

Seattle Forrest

Competition is a rising tide that floats all boats. Or a tail wind that smashes all KOMs.

msu2001la

I'll never forget the first time I saw a masters CX racer on a set of race-day tubulars laced to a PowerTap rear hub.
A few weeks earlier I had stretched my checkbook to spend $1500 on my first CX bike and was excited to try a race. It still blows my mind that people had 2-3 different wheelsets with PT hubs that they used on the same bike.

I also learned about pit bikes that day.

Psimet2001 

It is, was, and will always be a thing.

noodle soup

In 2015 or 2016 PowerTap hubs were marked down to $399, which was lass than retail for a DT Swiss 240s. At the end, PT hubs were very affordable,

Psimet2001 

That was early 2018. They were then sold to SRAM in early 2019.

I am doing research for a podcast on some of this at the moment. That also explains why the last powertap I purchased for a customer was late 2017.

noodle soup

Maybe it was only the straight pull version that was $399(in 2016). I had one for a couple of years, on a bike that was stolen 4/15/2018

Psimet2001 

MSRP on hubs didn't drop to $399 until 3/18. Before then it was $599. I do remember something wonky with the straight pull though. Right around the time we figured out how to calculate lengths they discontinued it. They may have dropped the price on that model as they eliminated it.

msu2001la

They very well could have been more affordable than I realized. You're right that $400 doesn't seem too crazy when you compare to other high-end hub options, or in the context of high-end wheelsets in general.

In my head, they were like $900 a pop, which was a bit shocking when I also was learning that tubular CX tires were $200 a pair (plus you had to pay a shop to glue them) and wheels were $1200, and you couldn't really ride these things anywhere other than a race course. I remember looking down at my shiny new $1500 Cannondale with stock alloy clinchers, and wondering what I'd gotten myself into.