Dave Mayer

Tubeless clinchers have as much chance of being adopted in elite race conditions as regular clincher wheels. Which is zero.

Look at a cross section of a clincher rim (including Tubeless). See those two protrusions (hooks) pointing groundwards that are required to hold the tire beads on? These are heavy. They are fragile. They cause pinch flats. Tubular rims eliminate these, leading to the perfect rim profile.

Anyway, back to the subject of boat-anchor road brakes (disks). I wasn't wasting the afternoon, but I finished a 5 hour ride on gravel, which included some soul-crushing climbs and fast descents. Zero traffic on this road, unless you count bears. No cell service.

I survived just fine on rim brakes - thank you.

dwolsten

That's a terrible comparison. As I recall (I never got one myself), 3D TVs worked quite well for what they were designed to do. If you wanted to watch Avatar in 3D with an experience as close as you could reasonably expect to that of a real theater, those 3D TVs were great.

The problem with 3D TVs wasn't technical, it was social and artistic: they didn't make any other really good 3D movies after that (just a bunch of lousy ones, many of which weren't even shot in 3D, but were converted to it in post-production), and people just didn't care enough to buy into the new technology. Not enough worthwhile content and not enough consumer interest (you can argue about whether the chicken or the egg came first), and so they finally gave up on trying to sell them. It wasn't because they didn't actually work as advertised.

Bang0Bang00

I'm pretty sure most TV's (and even some projectors) have 3D functionally built in. Certainly if it's a smart TV. The projectors usually go to half luminance since they're projecting two images. TV's just depend on which technology the brand had licensed or patented for the glasses.

3D didn't actually die.

Gravity, with Sandra Bullock, is one of the few modern movies that actually used the 3D element to help tell the story.

It's certainly worth a watch and the splurge on a set of glasses, if you have a newer mid to high end TV.

Bring your seatbelt.

Bah Humbug

Oh come off it. The 3DTV thing was an attempt to get everyone to go buy new TVs. Consumers said "meh". It died. Not everything pushed by an industry succeeds. Now they're trying HDR and we'll see how that goes.

dddd

Disc brake wheel changes are challenged by more than the thru axle or by lack of standardization. There is also the issue of tolerances, both in terms of the frame/fork and in terms of the wheels themselves.
Wheel bearing adjustments over the life of the bearings pushes the hub in one direction, so it's position (and thus the disc's position) changes with each adjustment. This in addition to the tolerances that the axle and freehub are manufactured to.
Frames/forks with thru-axles similarly must position the caliper mounting at least to where adjustment is provided to either side of a theoretical ideal position, where the caliper can then be adjusted to suit an ideal standard wheel.
I suspect that the problem with caliper alignment will be solved by using calipers that somehow retract their pistons further than they do today whenever the wheel is removed. This way, the pistons might self-readjust to the disc position with one or two pumps of the lever, and with just the initial lever pull providing at least some emergency stopping power short of the lever hitting the handlebar.

Disc brake issues for riders in the Grand Tours do at least seem to be biased very differently than for recreational roadie enthusiasts. Firstly, for most of us there will be a 1.5lb penalty for disc-braked bikes versus price-equivalent rim-braked models. This is from observation, though market-savvy manufacturers are now trending away from making this comparison as easy as comparing models having the same name (for obvious reasons).
So either the disc-braked bike is going to be much heavier or much more expensive than a weight or price-equivalent rim-braked model, and perhaps buyers will choose to split the difference and accept some more weight and some more cost.

The best carbon rim-brake wheels are said to have made great strides in recent years in terms of improved braking performance in wet weather, and continue to see improvements in design shared with top-level, disc-only mtb rims. I think that such wheels will continue to improve at a fairly rapid pace, and that rim calipers and pads will also continue to improve (and to accept larger rims /tires). Hydraulic rim calipers have yet to be given a fair shot in the market, but have the potential to improve leverage and modulation with virtually none of the issues currently besetting disc-braked road bikes! Many riders are buying new hydraulic disc bikes with nary a care about a pound or two of added weight, simply because their (possibly arthritic) hands feel much better while descending with disc brakes, but hydraulic rim brakes could show much of the same advantage (any old-school Magura Hydraulic rim brake users out there(?), testify!).

Aerodynamics is where it may get interesting, how soon before hydraulic pistons might be fitted into the fork crown and Unistrut stays of a carbon frameset? With today's carbon rim profiles equaling the outside width of the tire, complications of adding a needed quick-release for the brakes might be of no concern, not that a wider tire couldn't be forced past the pads slightly (like I always had to do on my centerpull-braked CX bike).

I'm not happy to observe that Shimano seems to have optimized their 8000 and 9100 cranksets for use with 135QR (same width as 142mm thru-axle in regards to the drivetrain). I've recently set up bikes with these cranksets and noticed that if I center the chainring's imaginary centerline with the cassette's centerline that the left crankarm actually protrudes out several mm further than the right crankarm, relative to the tire. On most bikes however one can't even center the chainrings with the cassette since the bb fitment prevents this outright! Campagnolo actually recently offered different cranksets optimized for 135mm vs. 130mm rear axle spacing, but may have now stopped offering this choice. Some crankset/bb installations can be tuned laterally using spacers, some can't. A bike with a better chainline is not trivial to me, so it would be unfortunate if the industry in any way treats their rim-braked customers as second-tier in this regard.

A couple more thoughts, hydraulic calipers can be damaged if the lever is accidentally applied while a wheel is out of the frame, something that WILL happen sooner or later to many riders.
Manufacturers have had issues with users using quick-release levers incorrectly for years, and shops have dealt with many issues related to axles installed not fully settled into their slots, especially since the sprung chain tension on today's bikes competes with the bike's ever-lighter weight holding things properly in (or out of) place as the QR lever gets flipped. Thru axles would appear to reduce liability concern with both of these issues.

dwolsten

Don't be stupid. Yes, it was an attempt to get people to buy new TVs, just like 4K and soon 8K are, and just like *every* new standard that industry pushes is, but it was also giving them a feature they didn't have before (3D). It really did work. The problem was that it just isn't a feature people care very much about, and aren't willing to pay for. It's hard to say exactly why: it could be the relative lack of decent 3D movies out there worth actually seeing in 3D instead of the regular 2D version, or it could be that it gave too many people headaches, or it could be that people just don't want to watch 3D stuff very much. I'm also not sure how well those TVs displayed regular 2D content. Basically, it's a neat feature that wasn't useful enough for lots of consumers to spend lots of money on. By contrast, 4K seems to be doing a lot better.

This isn't without precedent. LaserDiscs in the 80s were really great too, but there again, they just weren't great enough, and priced well enough, to achieve mass adoption. They were much better than everything else available at the time, but the high cost compared to VHS kept it from becoming widespread.

Bah Humbug

You're literally making my point for me. Have fun.

noodle soup

Name calling is not allowed here.

bleui

pretty much this