I do agree with your first point, I don’t see much revolutionary here.
Not much different than a mech cable snapping or the derailleur not being adjusted correctly by a tiny set screw and the chain ending up in your spokes.
Shit has catastrophic failures... that's never going to stop being a problem.
- Another battery to recharge
- Proprietary battery format making replacements difficult
- Needing an app to make simple adjustments. Hopefully it runs and is still compatible after 10+ years of ownership!
Bike components are wonders of precision machining and modern materials but conceptually, they have a beautiful simplicity. Not to get too "give up programming for woodworking" but all of that goes flying out the window the moment you add a proprietary wireless protocol and closed hardware in the middle of it.
The battery replacement is the real issue as technology gets older. Though to be honest, at some stage it gets more difficult to find parts for any system. I started to run into challenges sourcing several replacement parts for a 8-9 year old bike that had 10 speed Shimano group set, so it got sold and replaced. Batteries are not much different really.
Example: https://www.amazon.com/Jagwire-Inline-Indexed-Tension-Adjust...
I can't say I've had any problems with getting maintenance parts for my 2004 (19 years old) Shimano XTR mountain bike.
I've been riding and racing bikes since I was 15 years old and I'm nearly 50 now.
The batteries in the levers last a long time since they are just used for a button press. They are worth it. Never had an issue with signal or shifting.
In my experience, jockey pulleys don't add too much friction, as they're not under a great amount of force and don't fail all that often - for the same reasons. It's the derailleur arm itself that's very likely to take damage from abuse (by bending out of spec).
I would say the use of a clutch on a rear derailleur - something your SRAM 1x most certainly has, leaks more watts (tho v. v. little) - the compromise is certainly worth is, especially for the gear cluster spread you're running on the back.
This design looks just to be an improvement of some sort of clutch system, with purpose to try and move the derailleur arm out from being so low, where lovely things like rocks can hit it. That seems like a win to me, given my own assessment of how these things become worthless paperweights.
SRAM actually seems to be all-in on making rear derailleur replaceable in piecemeal, which seems to be a nice improvement over the design, in a very Right To Repair kinda way.
https://bikerumor.com/next-gen-sram-eagle-direct-mount-derai...
I'm not sure why such a design can't be run wireless if that's your preference. Looking at Shimano's offerings, even the 105 is electric these days.
But again: this is just a patent for an idea - it's not the first time Shimano has done this obviously
> Can you expand on your idea of why you think Shimano doesn't look relevant now? ... On road, every World Tour team, save 3 are running Shimano.
They all use electronic shifting. This is not the way to compare relevancy, given that it is a sponsorship. Next year, sram comes out with a better financial deal for the team than shimano and they go with them.
But the business of World Tour temas is also to win, as winning means being invited to the big races, which actually have coverage for the ads-on-wheels that riders are to get eyeballs on. If they can't win because of crap gear, they won't use said gear, no matter how much money given to them.
It's a fine balance, right? Some riders of high talent are also pretty controlling on the gear they use, and will bring their own bike sponsor into a team as part of the deal of transfer. Chicken and egg I guess: if the gear is irrelevant, you'll never see it on the Pro Tour.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bicycle-gearbox-sys...
Still growing at a nice rate and every single pro team has been using it for years now.
All I see now around where I live, which is heavily bike centric, are e-bikes...
For the same reason, what the pros do on their rigs is no concern for the 99.9% of mountain bikers.
I wouldn't bring anything I can't repair or troubleshoot directly out in the mountains, let alone anything that can discharge and not work anymore.
Shimano also brought electronic to their 105 line and SRAM has it on Rival. Neither is high end, never mind ultra high end. I’m not a MTBer so I’m not aware of how that market is, but electronic shifting is definitely prevalent in road, gravel and cross.
But why bother when ebikes are already cheaper? BAFANG motor with battery conversion kit is 2/3 of the cheapest SRAM kit available($1.2).
Given that electronic shifting is still $1.2k, it would be nice to lower that cost a bit so that all price points can participate more easily.
I have the wireless electronic sram shifting on my 1x Lauf. It is kind of expensive, but amazing and worth the simplicity of it all. It just works and shifts perfectly every time.
I could never go back to cables. The revolution will be to figure out ways to make this same electronic shifting technology less expensive so that it can be installed on every non-e-bike out there.