When Did Good Enough Become Obsolete?

As a teenager, I discovered cycling, and it changed my life. Thanks to the Kennett brothers, the Wellington siblings generally regarded as the godfathers of mountain biking in New Zealand, I stumbled into what was then a very nascent sport. I wasn’t exactly blessed with a large social circle and, despite being intensely interested in girls, that interest was largely unreciprocated. So I threw myself into bikes instead. Forty years later, I’m still at it, and remain something of a sucker for the engineering of bicycles. I like beautifully made things, and bikes are particularly satisfying because they are mechanically honest. You can see how they work. A gear changes because a derailleur moves. A wheel turns because a bearing turns. There isn’t much room for bullshit. Or there never used to be…

Which is why a conversation I had recently with Michael, a local bike-shop owner, got me thinking about something much bigger than bicycles. I was selling him some bike parts and, as tends to happen when two bike nerds meet, the conversation wandered into increasingly obscure territory. Michael has a PhD in the history of bicycle manufacturing and has literally written the book on the subject, so when he starts talking about early Breezers, Mavic derailleurs or lugged titanium frames, he’s not just making conversation. He’s drawing on decades of research. Eventually we got onto planned obsolescence, and suddenly the bicycle industry looked like a rather neat case study in one of the great scams of modern consumer capitalism.

The modern economy needs us to keep buying things. Once everyone already owns the thing you sell, the challenge becomes finding a reason for them to buy another one. Sometimes the answer is to make a genuinely better product. Often, however, it’s considerably easier to make the old one feel inadequate. Technology companies have turned this into an art form. Your phone is two years old and suddenly its battery is rubbish, the camera is embarrassing, and the operating system feels prehistoric.

The trick isn’t necessarily to make the old product stop working. That would be too obvious. The cleverer approach is to redefine what “good enough” means. Convince people that the thing they own is no longer current, and they will often do the rest themselves. We have become remarkably willing participants in this arrangement, replacing perfectly functional things because something newer exists. The bicycle industry didn’t invent this playbook, but it has become rather good at using it.

When I started riding, a mountain bike with six or seven cogs at the back seemed like an engineering marvel. Fast forward 40 years and an insane 13 cogs on the back happens. Along the way, we’ve had multiple new standards and enough component incompatibilities to make a person yearn for the simplicity of yore. Some of these developments genuinely make bicycles better. But every new standard also creates a reason why your existing stuff is suddenly less desirable.

A bicycle that cost $15,000 only a few years ago might now fetch a few hundred dollars on the second-hand market. Think about that. It may have thousands of perfectly good kilometres left in it. But it has become old. And in modern consumer capitalism, old is increasingly another word for worthless.

This is the genius of planned obsolescence. It doesn’t necessarily require anyone to deliberately make a bad product. It simply requires an industry to continually move the goalposts. We’ve accepted this almost everywhere. Cars increasingly come with software subscriptions. Phones are replaced because the camera has improved incrementally. Clothes are produced so cheaply that repairing them makes little economic sense. Kitchen appliances are sealed units rather than things designed to be serviced. Furniture is often cheaper to replace than repair. We’ve built an economy in which the most valuable customer isn’t the one who buys a good product. It’s the one who buys it again.

There is something particularly absurd about this when applied to bicycles because bicycles are, fundamentally, old technology. Their essential architecture has been around for centuries. A well-made steel frame doesn’t suddenly become structurally inadequate because someone has invented another gear ratio. And yet we’ve managed to apply the logic of Silicon Valley to a machine whose basic engineering was largely sorted out long ago. Of course modern bicycles are better in many ways. But for most people riding to work, around town or up a local hill, the difference between perfectly good and technically current is considerably smaller than the industry would like us to believe.

The people keeping old things alive are often the ones who understand their value best. Michael still works on parts manufacturers stopped making years ago. He is preserving not just bicycles but a philosophy of ownership that increasingly feels unfashionable: fix it, maintain it and keep it going. There is something quietly radical about refusing to accept that an object has reached the end of its useful life simply because the company that made it would prefer you bought another one.

I’m not suggesting we retreat into some imagined golden age or pretend that progress is always a bad thing. I own far too many bicycles and have bought more shiny new things than I care to admit. But I’m increasingly interested in the things I don’t need to replace. The eight-speed still works. The old laptop still writes. The jacket with a repaired zip still keeps the rain out. Maybe the most useful question isn’t whether something is old, or whether something newer is better. Maybe it’s simply whether the thing we already own still does the job.

For now, my old school bike does. And I’ve decided that I, rather than a product manager somewhere, will decide when it becomes obsolete.