Ho boy, there's lots to unpack here! Lets start with the easy: Apple didn't invent the tablet, but they popularized it, and ultimately forced others to compete on their level. Kind of like how Xerox invented the GUI, but it was Apple that pushed it into the mainstream. But I digress.
Bikes are a lot like boats, or horses; giant pits that you shovel money into. I'd never be under the illusion that a bike is an investment like an RRSP, or an ETF. That being said, I'd hope that if I spent $8K+ on a bike, I'd get more than 36 months before things were out of date. Not everyone that buys a top-end bike has access to deals, and a number of people I know have sunk serious coin into a bike with the expectation that it'll be \*the\* bike for a while. Imagine you bought a top-of-the-line bike in 2014, only to have Boost come along. I for one would be choked.
That brings me to the incrementalism. Sure a MY19 bike is a big improvement over something from 2012, and yards ahead of anything circa 2008, but how much of a jump is it over something from 2016? Or MY17? Does something a touch longer and slacker justify a whole new bike? For some people it sure does, but I'm not so convinced. I'm also not convinced that consumers need to be beta testers for engineers and their ideas; it smacks of the gaming industry's trend towards selling "early access" to games that often times are never completed. I understand that innovation needs to happen, and I'd much rather ride a modern bike than one from when I first started riding, but the plateauing of advances gives me some pause.
Finally with regards to the end-of-life, I know that my effort to keep existing product running is but a drop in the ocean, but when I pull back and see shortening product life cycles in more than just the bike industry, I wonder where we're going to continue finding all the raw materials to feed this cycle, and what happens to stuff once it's done. We all may be doing our own tiny steps, but it all adds up.
Nov. 2, 2018, 9:41 p.m. - Matt Lee
Ho boy, there's lots to unpack here! Lets start with the easy: Apple didn't invent the tablet, but they popularized it, and ultimately forced others to compete on their level. Kind of like how Xerox invented the GUI, but it was Apple that pushed it into the mainstream. But I digress. Bikes are a lot like boats, or horses; giant pits that you shovel money into. I'd never be under the illusion that a bike is an investment like an RRSP, or an ETF. That being said, I'd hope that if I spent $8K+ on a bike, I'd get more than 36 months before things were out of date. Not everyone that buys a top-end bike has access to deals, and a number of people I know have sunk serious coin into a bike with the expectation that it'll be \*the\* bike for a while. Imagine you bought a top-of-the-line bike in 2014, only to have Boost come along. I for one would be choked. That brings me to the incrementalism. Sure a MY19 bike is a big improvement over something from 2012, and yards ahead of anything circa 2008, but how much of a jump is it over something from 2016? Or MY17? Does something a touch longer and slacker justify a whole new bike? For some people it sure does, but I'm not so convinced. I'm also not convinced that consumers need to be beta testers for engineers and their ideas; it smacks of the gaming industry's trend towards selling "early access" to games that often times are never completed. I understand that innovation needs to happen, and I'd much rather ride a modern bike than one from when I first started riding, but the plateauing of advances gives me some pause. Finally with regards to the end-of-life, I know that my effort to keep existing product running is but a drop in the ocean, but when I pull back and see shortening product life cycles in more than just the bike industry, I wonder where we're going to continue finding all the raw materials to feed this cycle, and what happens to stuff once it's done. We all may be doing our own tiny steps, but it all adds up.