Good afternoon,
The first warning bell for me is a Kickstarter campaign,
this is made is even more troubling by the comments in the linked to article where there are statements that there was a previous iteration of the product (x shifter) on kickstarter by Paul Gallagher and not all funders were delivered a product.
The non delivery is not disputed but blamed on IP Theft, covid, the harware engineer left, the marketing team spent all the money.....
Moving on to the product;
I really don't understand the shifter unit, I struggle with the much larger Di2 buttons so how am I going to find the right bulge with gloves on? I really can't see how the design of this unit got through a group of unbiased real world users.
Weight: Our actuator is just 55 grams — less than a quarter of Archer’s (~250g).
Low weight is almost a negative here, whatever the servo/ cable puller motor is, it needs to pull a cable against the rear mech's return spring, that is real physical movement and forces. So the last thing you want is a bit of cheap plastic that lasted for a few thousand test miles but breaks when it has been through a few -5 to 30 deg C cycles.
With Di2, Shimano knew what forces were being exerted and in what direction in a rear mech specifically designed for electronic shifting. As this is a cable puller it needs to be built to handle loads that were intended to be handled by indexed shifters, I know that you can use modern mechs with friction shifters but there you do have the ability to wind up the friction.
So my big concern would be that they simply haven't spent enough money testing the product with real world users, okay they do have X shifter knowledge to fall back on. Also the tone of some of the OG replies in the article would worry me that after some use I would end up with a broken product and
it's not out fault answers.
At a full price $149, which will probably translate to £149, that is not looking to be such a great offering as there are a number of retailers offering 105 Di2 at around £300 more than mechanical and this is of course for both front and rear shifting.
I know that there is at least one Chinese electronic groupset that is programable from 8 (possibly 7) speed upwards. I have wondered if Shimano decided to fixed the cable movements within their rear mechs because it suited the image they were aiming for or in practice doing so simply works better.
I love electronic shifting, but it wouldn't take much to make it worse than mechanical and moving the shifting away from the brake levers into a tiny little unit would probly be that
much.
I do my commute on Tiagra STI and that is head and shoulders above the Claris STI I have on my pub bike, I used to commute with Di2 but when the plastic frame broke I move the groupset onto my steel framed "fun" bike.
Bye
Ian
