Dave wrote: "The vintage equivalent would be speedometers and stopwatches I guess. Examining post-ride data from today's gadgets is entertaining, certainly good for killing some time.
I can't say that any of this new stuff is much better, but is has opened up a market for more expensive stuff."
A year ago I finally relented to pressure from my bike-racer, bike store worker, and gadget-loving son and accepted his gift of a bike computer. This was the second one he gave me, the first was a basic model with speed and distance that died in a bike crash a few years ago. This new one also reads cadence and has a few other buttons that who the heck knows what they do. It's not the wireless model so I have wires going to different sensors on my left chainstay, a little button-sized magnet on a rear wheel spoke, and another to the left crank arm. This, my son said, is the low-tech version. His rear hub is a power meter gizmo and his computer, which is larger, receives a signal from the rear power meter hub as well as satellite signals telling him his precise location on the planet, speed, altitude, watts, cadence, horoscope and a plethora of other useless (to me) information. After using my computer for a year I have yet to pay attention to the cadence numbers on the compute r. Why would I look at a number and make a decision based on that number when cycling is so much a matter of... "subjectivity" interjects my mechanical engineering university student bike racer, etc. son.
I disagree with him. It's not a subjective feeling when I make minute adjustments to my cadence and power output in relationship to the topography, wind velocity and direction, location on the paceline, physical conditioning, etc. It is a series of calculations being performed in my brain, lame as it is, a much more complex computer, taking into consideration much more variables than any expensive gadget available at the bike store. I'm probably wrong, I'm old-school as my son says. "Things are different dad. Why do the pros on the TdF use them for training and during the ride?" I dunno. They also use a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense to me either, but that's probably off topic. They're sponsored by the very same companies that want to sell this crap to us. It's like why do people spend so much per gram of "fat" lost from a bike when a good dump in the morning or a haircut can make such a difference in the weight of the bike + rider, that is, if grams really matter?
I'm happy with any of my trusty steel bikes, even happier when I pass some power-metered, garmin-obsessed, "weight-weenie" on the road. Truth be told, it doesn't happen very often now, but that's not a fact attributable to better lighter faster more intelligent machines... it's those extra 20 lbs hanging over my belt.
Carlos Ovalle
Long Beach, California, USA