Electronic shifting felt gimmicky to me until I tried it. It’s actually pretty awesome, although if you don’t want to spend the money for it, there is also great mechanical shifting still available.

My road bike is electronic shifting and absolutely awesome. Every shift is absolutely perfect, and I set it up to handle compensating the large gear jump between front chain rings automatically so I don’t have to shift the rear to compensate myself. Also, since I’m still getting used to the new gear ratios compared to my gravel bike, it’s nice that my headunit can warn me when I’m doing something stupid with the gear selection.

I sometimes wish my gravel bike was also electronic, but it’s not like I enjoy it any less because it isn’t. It’s a “man, if I had a shitload of cash laying around” not a “I neeeeeeeed this” thing. I still put 3,500 miles on the bike, it’s still an awesome bike, I still have reasons to ride it.

I’m running a Garmin Edge too. I just wanted to use something other than garmin in a post for once.

Quadlock literally designed a new mount because this was enough of an issue.

It’s literally a cycle computer that also puts a finite lifespan on your fucking handlebars.

You can get the same effect cheaper by JB Welding an Elemnt Roam to your handlebars.

From experience with FitBit that kind of GPS usage absolutely eats phone battery. Also, phones are not the most accurate things with GPS. I would have weird meandering paths and cut corners everywhere since it piggybacked off the phone. And this was nearly ideal, dead flat, open area, I can’t imagine how wonky it would have gone with bridges and tunnels and such.

The Garmin on the other hand is so absurdly accurate that I can tell where in the lane I rode even under bridges and through short tunnels, and it will keep that accuracy going literally all day without any battery concerns. I really only need about 16 continuous hours of battery at the most for the riding I do right now, although my wife has been trying to talk me into trying bike packing where the couple days of battery the Garmin should be able to do might be useful.

Phone service, I kind of agree can be tethered from a phone (actually, thats exactly how my bike computer does it for live tracking and emergency alerts if I crash). I’m not that fussed about my phone’s weight, so I just stick the phone in a jersey pocket and kinda forget it’s there. The human body makes for a decent enough shock absorber that the vibrations that kill phone cameras on handle bars don’t really get to your phone in a pocket.

I mean, one of my bikes has expensive electronic parts that can’t be removed.

It’s also the bike that absofuckinglutely does not get left anywhere, like to the point that I don’t even have a lock for it.

These handlebars are still dumb though.

I believe this is what those handle bars are trying to replace I couldn’t be bothered to go wake the rest the sensors up or load a route so half the data fields are blank. It also can show a route map (and reroute while offline), alert for cycling specific hazards, show Strava segments (assuming you have that set up), and a bunch of other stuff that I honestly don’t know because Garmin crams so much stuff into their stuff that I’m not sure anyone actually uses it all at the same time. There’s really no reason that a phone can’t do what this thing does since most sensors have the option of connecting through Bluetooth instead of ANT+ now. But a phone won’t do it as well, or nearly as long. The 840 I pictured has something absurd like 25 hours of battery while running navigation on multiband GPS if I remember right.