Not a specific issue to electronic shifting but exacerbated there. If something goes wrong with the battery or one of the components it's going to be increasingly difficult to find parts. Gone are the days where you can just slap on a new deraileur when yours breaks. A dead battery with old 5-pole Di2 means either scouring ebay or getting a full kit to replace. Ditto for once Sram inevitable comes out with a battery "upgrade" and stops selling the old battery type.

I do think as you get older (I'm not even that old but nearing 50 now gulp!) you really get annoyed by all the forced upgrades that are unnecessary, and super expensive. Plus, if you ever take the time to learn a simpler system (mech shifting in particular), you learn you can use it nearly forever.

I recently self-did my seasonal refresh of my mech road bike. All-external cable routing, Tiagra groupset. The Favero I have on it costs nearly as much as the entire bike when I bought it. But man, it rides great once everything's set to go. The rim brakes in particular - I improved the housing approach for the rear brake - and now the rear brake is like 90+% as good as the front brake, which means amazing stopping power. I'm sure discs can be even stronger, but it's actually unnecessary by that point, as you're locking up both wheels and skidding out. And no obsolescence - you can run that friction shifter with like 6speed-12speed.

I do have a racing TT bike with Di2, internal-routed everything, fancy brakes, and I can't do anything myself on it - it's just too much of a hassle for a non-professional to do it reasonably well. I still love and ride that bike, but I'm suddenly understanding while the old grizzly guys often in their 60s+ are often riding friction-shift bikes, and riding them really well.

I actually think my next road bike is going to be a simple one that has widely available mech parts, and probably a friction shifter for the rear mech and the front to forgo any brifter cost or complexity. And just ride the heck out of it. I'll still try and keep it reasonably light and even aero, but I'm def tiring of the annoyance of upkeeping a modern racing TT bike long-term. It's easy to love the bike for its first year when no maintenance is required, but get to year 2, and especially year 3+ and you're dreading it every time.

However, I'm no Luddite still, and newer tech does have its place, and I'll love it just the same. The Kickr Core + Zwift Cog, in particular - that's just awesome stuff. I got it and it's amazing how it can turn any bike into a perfectly-shifting 24-geared bike on zwift.

Fair point, although I have Di2 from 2009 that is still going strong and Calfee frames and HED wheels are still incerdible products with great longevity.

No self respecting "Old Schooler" would have electronic shifting.

one thing for me is that as you spend longer in the sport, you've also got more time/money/space invested in kit. so switching over to tubeless, for instance, would mean buying new tools, learning a new system, etc. also, i have multiple bikes and so does my wife, so swapping the entire 'family' over to a new standard is a pain in the ass and something i want to do rarely.

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

I know right, in 2010 I picked up a Merida pros bike with very low mileage for about 30% of new price, it came with the Di2. I will admit that Di2 is worth it and I'm sure that some new tech is better then old tech., its just annoying that really nice stuff becomes obsolete. My TT bike is still mechanical, I will upgrade but waiting for used prices to keep falling.

It reminds me of golf where I have been told that the big industry players have 3 or 4 years of new drivers already developed so that people feel compelled to upgrade each year, the people who upgrade are most likely the people who shoot 90 or 100, meanwhile my clubs are 10 years old and i'm a scratch handicap.

Or hockey where my boys need the new sticks each year, which are now $400 each.

Its funny but I worked in the investment industry and the richest people were also some of the cheapest people which is partly how they became rich and its sometimes hard to change habits and splurge even when you have a several million (or 5-10MM) in the bank.

It's funny. The compatibility problem with mechanical indexing is a fairly fundamental issue, although one upside is that the manufacturers can't really protect their compatibility ecosystems: third parties can readily produce replacement shifters.

E-shifting as a technology can easily solve the compatibility problem: there's zero reason that a 12-speed e-shifter can't also be a 2-speed, 3-speed, 4-speed, ... , 4294967296-speed, etc shifter. But the ecosystems are more strongly controlled.

Probably fewer than six speeds as well. A lot of friction shifters don't pull enough cable to work well with many 11+ speed systems, though.

I often believe that improvements in bikes over the years have made them more versatile with better tire clearance, but marginally better at certain things, expecially as weight has crept up. The converse is that older bikes can be very good at a specific task

Just need aero? old aero bike
need a very light bike? rim brake light bike
gravel bike for very little road riding? old hardtail MTB


older rims and non-tubeless tires: easier tube/tire changes
external cable routing, threaded BB's, rim brakes: easier to replace/service
less speeds: cheaper cassettes
non-integrated bars? easier to travel with, can buy very narrow handlebars

I think the 11 Speed era was the zenith of bike groupsets. We had disk and rim braking options, mechanical or electronic options, great gearing options, and fantastic compatibility across brands. Now 12 Speed is a dumpster fire. I dislike everyone's rear cassette options. Forced 10 tooth cog in SRAM is just stupid. Tiny chainrings annoy me. No more cross-brand compatibility. Etc.

That said, I now have an old tech 11S electronic tri bike with rim brakes and a totally current 12S electronic road bike with the latest wheel & tire tech. Both are pretty sweet, just in different ways.

My biggest pet peeve in all of cycling right now is the artificial locking of shifting systems to a single system. In theory any Sram shifter should be able to work with any Sram deraileur, likewise for Shimano and Campy. There's already bluetooth connectivity to the whole system, you can update the software on any part of it to communicate with any other part of it. Locking it further into a certain number of cogs is nothing short of planned obsolescence.

There's room in the market for someone to sell a $50 product that patches the software to shift differently. The issue is you can't just try it tho. Any other part you can put on an test, remove if it doesn't work. If you load new firmware and it doesn't work you've just dumped $2,000 worth of components.

I struggle to find the value in a lot of the upgrades made since 11sp came out. Not to say I don't use newer tech, but there isn't value outside of specific use cases.

Alu+rim braking is exceptional and HED wheels are more than fast enough aero wise.

Wireless shifting has more fail points than I'm comfortable with.

12sp and 1x gearing on the road is not definitively better than 11sp, or even 10sp.

As for the upgrades I have:

Disc brakes and 1x/12sp are great on a mtb.

Di2 is a value add on TT bikes because you only route once and have multiple shifting positions.

The bikes my wife and I naturally gravitate towards on easy or fun days are Ti frames with 10sp shifting and sub-1200g alu wheelsets. So light and lively!

Yes, my commuter/town bike is a custom Ti bike with full 10speed DA that I picked up for around $700 about 7 years ago. When my brother visited a few years ago we went for a long ride and he used the bike and was raving about afterwards compared to his carbon bike at home.

After many years of riding the latest and greatest carbon bikes (road, TT, MTB, gravel), I'm now down to just one carbon bike, which will be up for sale soon.

My all-time favorite bike is my Ti road bike with rim brakes which still gets ridden on a regular basis. Just an absolute dream to ride. Everything else is either steel or aluminum. One of the steel bikes has SRAM AXS on it but it will soon be torn down and rebuilt with friction shifting - very excited abut that.