Originally Posted by PoorInRichfield

Warning: This thread is pointless and is just me rambling about a thought that's been rolling around in my head for a while


Anywho... your thoughts? Are bikes that are more than a few years old worthy of the scrap heap? Is buying a brand new bike a psychological gain or a good idea? Should we all buy a new bike every two years to keep up-to-date along with our iPhones and Android phones?

Note: I currently ride a 2020 Trek Domane SL7, so I'm a little hypocritical when it comes to my argument that one doesn't need a new bike. However, in my defense, I did buy it used for substantial cost savings... I would've stuck with my 2015 Domane had the deal not come along.

Originally Posted by PoorInRichfield

Warning: This thread is pointless and is just me rambling about a thought that's been rolling around in my head for a while

Having just sold a handful of bikes recently, one of the most common bargaining tactics used by potential buyer's to get me to drop the price of my bikes was that the bikes were a couple of years old (ranging from 2013 to 2015 model years) and thus not worth anything. On more than one occasion, I'd get someone sending me a link to some "bicycle blue book" stating that my bikes were worthless because they weren't the latest and greatest. I learned to ignore those potential buyers and my bikes all sold for what I was asking... thanks to COVID-19

That got me thinking... are we as a society being duped into thinking that a bike that is a few years old is now a piece of outdated junk, just because we've become used to a 2 year obsolescence cycle for electronic goods? (I.e. "Moore's Law" has had a pretty big role in people buying a new mobile phone or computer every 2 years because that's about how long it takes before a new, much faster model is invented.) Unless you're planning on buying a bike with SRAM eTap, Shimano Di2, or some other electronic components group, the entire rest of the bike is not electronic and not subject to radical improvements from year to year.

I often think manufacturers just introduce new models with new marketing hype to convince us that the newer model is radically better than the old when it potentially is not. For example, I'm still wondering why Shimano created the Ultegra R8000 group set when it's hardly a departure from the 6800 group set. Both are 11 speed and both work just fine. It's my opinion that used bikes with Ultegra 6800 are a great value because they're perceived as being "yesterday's news" but work just as good as the new R8000 bikes.

While there certainly are incremental advances and improvements in bikes over the years, I personally think that one ought to really consider if you really need the latest model bike or if you just want it. There's nothing wrong with either, but if you can convince yourself that you don't need a brand new bike, you can save yourself a lot of money. Not only that, bicycles typically hold their value worse than cars do... once you ride the bike away from the LBS, you'll have a hard time selling it for anything near what you paid for it (well, excluding our current bizarro-world COVID-19 bike shortage.)

Anywho... your thoughts? Are bikes that are more than a few years old worthy of the scrap heap? Is buying a brand new bike a psychological gain or a good idea? Should we all buy a new bike every two years to keep up-to-date along with our iPhones and Android phones?

Note: I currently ride a 2020 Trek Domane SL7, so I'm a little hypocritical when it comes to my argument that one doesn't need a new bike. However, in my defense, I did buy it used for substantial cost savings... I would've stuck with my 2015 Domane had the deal not come along.

Originally Posted by PoorInRichfield

Warning: This thread is pointless and is just me rambling about a thought that's been rolling around in my head for a while .........................That got me thinking... are we as a society being duped into thinking that a bike that is a few years old is now a piece of outdated junk, just because we've become used to a 2 year obsolescence cycle for electronic goods?.................................

Originally Posted by Darth Lefty

For a while new cell phones were obviously better than the 2yo model. That's not really happening any more. The numbers keep going up but they don't matter, screen size is just a fashion and its resolution is sufficient to the eyeball, the cameras are sharp enough, the data rate is fast enough, the software features are not dependent on the model, and so on.

This is happening with mountain bikes. A mountain bike today is obviously better than one from 10 years ago and even just 5 there's a difference. Road bikes? ehhhh... you could argue nothing important has changed since the arrival of Ergo's. Even Di2 is nearly 20 years old.

Originally Posted by seypat

I had to upgrade my cell phone a week or 2 ago. It was a Galaxy S7 and still got the job done. I left it on top of a car and took off. I backtracked and found it in the middle of the road. In the middle of a lane, not in one of the tire track areas. I quickly parked and ran back to pick it up in hopes that the Spigen Tough Armour case had worked and it survived the tumble. As I was standing on the side of the road waiting for a car to pass so I could retrieve it, I was really irritated with myself for making the mistake. The occupants of the passing car however, had a different idea. They rolled their windows down, started shouting, swerved and ran over the phone! My car was a 100 yards away, so no pursuit. I picked up the phone. It was still working, but the screen was toast.

If there was any humor taken from the incident, it was that the second the tires rolled over the phone, I was no longer angry at myself. All of the blame had been shifted to the vandals. I also got immediate closure. I got in the car and headed to the phone store. Replaced it with a Galaxy S10E. As for the new phone, it looks like the old phone, and just like the old phone, It's way more phone than I'll ever need.

The people at the Verizon store said that the Galaxy S7's OS was no longer receiving updates and security patches were only being sent out every few months. Maybe the whole incident was a blessing in disguise. The battery life was beginning to get kind of short, if I think about it. Sounds kind like the excuses for justifying a new bike purchase, doesn't it?

Originally Posted by bmcer

It's all highly personal, so I refuse to get dogmatic about any of it. I'm very happy with my current ride ( a 2013 vintage BMC Teammachine SLR01 equipped with a 2015 Campy Record EPS 11 speed group all on a set of self-built CF tubular wheels shod in 25mm Conti's) The frame fits me well and rides and handles as comfortably as anything else I've tried (including my 1979 Bruce Gordon custom). The shifting is wicked fast, quiet, and reliable. As of EPS V3, the ugly battery pack and external wires are gone. The range and placement of the gear ratios available with my compact 34/50 crank set and 12-29 cassette fits my pedaling style and preferred cadence quite well without duplicates or unusable combinations. Yes, it has rim brakes, but I've never been at a loss for enough braking power to make a bad situation even worse. After all, no braking system is going to make your tires "stickier" or the road less slick. My only complaint is that as I've gotten older, I could use a little more low end gearing for climbing.

So what's "new" that might get these old legs up my favorite climbs with less load on these equally old knees? 12 speed cassettes with small cogs so small they limit my choice of hubs? Puny looking crank sets? Sure, if you don't mind 3 or more ratios that are near duplicates along with another 3 I'll never use? I think not. Especially not on a comfortable but fixed income. I'm not a Luddite, just someone with enough engineering background to understand the pursuit of "perfection" often blinds people to the beauty of "good enough".

Just my 2¢ and only directly applicable to me.

Originally Posted by DaveSSS

Your rant about the latest 12 speed gearing if off. As a mechanical engineer, I carefully evaluate the gear ratios before buying. If you really need a lower ratio than a 34/29, then there is the new 11-32 12 speed. That would give you a 50/11 that you may not need. The new 48/32 crank with an 11-29 provides a little more top gear and a little more low gear. The 48/16 is nearly identical to a 50/17 ratio and there is still a 1T shift at the 16-17.

The duplicate gears comment makes no sense to me. Every setup has duplicate or near duplicate gear ratios, even your current one. With the new 12 speed, every gear combination is useable, except the big/big and little/little. That has not changed.

I made the change from a 50/34 to the 48/32 last July and really like it. I need a lot more low gear, so I have the 11-34. The 11-19 sprockets are the same as the 11-29 or 11-32 cassettes. I can't complain.

Originally Posted by bmcer

For the record, what I said hardly qualifies as a rant. It was just a expression of my opinion ...

Originally Posted by DaveSSS

The response qualifies as a rant, when it includes information that is easily proven to be incorrect ...

Originally Posted by bmcer

For the record, what I said hardly qualifies as a rant. It was just a expression of my opinion which was based on a comparative analysis of the SRAM 46/33 X 33/10 vs my current 50/34 X 29/12 configuration using a simple gear ration spread sheet. (I was a systems engineer before retiring.) FWIW, I'd be interested to know where you found the 48/32 X 34/11 combination you describe. I've not seen that configuration for sale.

Where I'm located, there aren't a lot of long enough steep enough descents to make gears > 112 inches particularly useful for this very cautious downhill rider. Usable, certainly; useful to me, not so much.

Originally Posted by burnthesheep

We recognize the value in the incremental changes as deeply involved bicycle users.

Only deeply involved iPhone fanboi users probably recognize anything different in use in the last 5+ years. I'm sure an iPhone fanboi could point out a dozen changes in 5 years that "changed their life" in using the phone also.

Originally Posted by Seattle Forrest

Phone cameras have been getting better. I use Android not Apple, went out to shoot nothing photos with a friend, his S20 made images that look like they came from an SLR on a tripod. Don't know what they looked like at 100% though. But the best camera is the one you have with you.

That said, mine is 4 generations old.

Originally Posted by Bah Humbug

It is a fact that they're a lot better.

A FF camera with a lens the size of my calf will still clobber a cell phone camera (as should be obvious), especially when the lens has to get further and further away from "normal".

Originally Posted by Seattle Forrest

Phone cameras have been getting better. I use Android not Apple, went out to shoot nothing photos with a friend, his S20 made images that look like they came from an SLR on a tripod. Don't know what they looked like at 100% though. But the best camera is the one you have with you.

That said, mine is 4 generations old.

Originally Posted by Bah Humbug

It is a fact that they're a lot better.

A FF camera with a lens the size of my calf will still clobber a cell phone camera (as should be obvious), especially when the lens has to get further and further away from "normal".