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There are companies now making knockoff cleats.
Every one of the knockoffs I have seen is a piece of junk. I wouldn't ride any of them.
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This was a pretty major customer abandoning by Wahoo.
The X series design is over 30 years old. There was no way that new ownership - regardless of who it was - would ever be able to justify continued support for a product that has been dead ever since the Zero was introduced over a decade ago. This is like complaining about Sony's inexcusable failure to provide new Betamax cassettes... the timeline is even on par; Sony discontinued new cassette production 12 years after they stopped producing new recorders.
The biggest mistake Speedplay ever made was probably continuing production of the X series long after any reasonable business case for doing so existed. This just encouraged people to believe in the fantasy that this support would be perpetual, regardless of the viability of the product on the market. My understanding is that when Wahoo took over the company they were astonished at just how upside down the P&L was on product lines like this, and I don't think anyone who was actually familiar with their range of offerings could objectively be surprised at that assessment.
It sucks for folks who were wedded to products like the X pedals, or the Frogs, but when you see posts from people who are *just now* finding themselves looking for new cleats, when they haven't been manufactured since prior to the acquisition of the company in 2019, the timeline on this says a lot about the nature of the problem. It's hard to make a business out of selling cleats that don't wear out very quickly.
FWIW, there *is* a company making high-quality replacement springs for the X-series cleats, and that is all most folks actually need to keep their system running...
https://nextcleat.com/
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