Originally Posted by
kingston
The cheapest Trek road bike with hydraulic disks is around $4,000. So sure, if the average rider spends at least four grand on a new bike they may be better off with disk brakes. It's not true for me personally, but I'm probably not the average rider either.
OTOH, if I want to buy my wife or kid a thousand dollar bike, they're getting crappy mechanical disks even though I know that rim brakes would be lighter, cheaper, easier to maintain, and stop just as well 99% of the time. It's really brilliant because when people come back to complain about how terrible their mechanical disks are, you can up-sell them to a four-thousand-dollar bike with hydraulics.
Mechanical discs aren't that bad. A friend of mine has them on his fat bike and they work pretty good.
For $1800 Giant will sell you hydraulic discs...
https://www.giant-bicycles.com/us/contend-ar-1
Reality still is that rim brakes are going away on future bikes. So you might as well embrace the better stopping power and the ability to run wider tires. 700 x 32 on my Trek Domane are sooooooo comfortable.