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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Bicycles
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^^^ This.
Cables work fine when you're dealing with nine or ten rear gears, but going up from that to eleven or more gears, indexing becomes a problem, and an electrically-operated derailleur that can hit a gear correctly, quickly, every single time is nice.
For casual riders this probably doesn't matter, since people ride around on badly-tuned derailleurs all day long and just put up with it. Heck, even recreational racers probably don't need it. This is for guys wearing yellow or polka-dot jerseys around France, for whom milliseconds lost to shifting make a real difference.
I'm nowhere near good enough for this to make a difference for me, and I wouldn't want the complexity, which is why my commuter has no gears at all--I was tired of fiddling and wanted something that would never, ever break.
I feel a wired solution would be better, more reliable and more secure, but wireless is the new black.
And to be honest, a friction shifter would probably still be more reliable than an indexed derailleur. It's too bad this "old tech" gets pushed away for newer, more complex stuff :(
I think the issue with friction shifters was that you can miss or end up between gears, but with eleven speeds and almost no space between them, you have a good point.
Yes, friction shifting is often by feel. That's a pro and a con, depending on who you ask 😂