One of the reasons the tech nerd in my is against some of the fancy modern e-bikes like Cowboy. And the silly wireless shifter stuff.

The only thing I realize and accept I won’t repair myself are hydraulic brakes and wheel truing. At least I understand the mechanism, I just think someone with more experience should do it. Everything else on a bike should be simple enough to fix with the right (cheap-ish) tool, an hour or so of time and a good manual.

It's funny that the high end (human powered/"analog") bikes tend to actually be pretty good at this. Want to change your $5k+ bike from 11s to 12s? Yep, should be doable

you'll need to replace group set and possibly the rear hub, but it's totally possible.

Upgrade from cable to electronic shifting? Again, totally doable.

Switch from Shimano to SRAM or Campy? Yep, should be possible.

Now, if you crack your carbon frame...well, that's another story.

I hate this trend.

My "gravel bike" is a '90s mountainbike with dirt drop bars.
My "travel bike" is a '90s mountainbike with rack and fenders.
And my "cruiser" is a '90s mountainbike with ape hanger handlebars.

I guess the best thing to do is to research the bikes that do this bullshit and don't buy them.

The great thing about bikes is that there's just... a shitload out there, especially vintage repairable units. And LOTS of vintage frames and parts that are often tossed to the road as trash, just cleanly available to take. It does of course require one to have the drive to do the repairs yourself, but that is another thing; thank goodness DIY bike repair shops exist.

It's sad, but there is such a small percentage of people that care about this at all. When Shimano announced they where going with a new driver for 12s cassettes called microspline instead of using the standard XD from SRAM I said to myself people won't fall for this crap.. but they did. And now we have three different freehub standards.

This really is a concern.

All the bikes I ride, are still using standard components that are easy to fix/tune/replace at home.

But I'm seeing more and more bikes with great tech, don't get me wrong, but they have a very limited lifespan and almost no longevity in the coming decades.

Meanwhile, my 90's MTB, which goes anywhere and carries anything, has very inexpensive and easily replaceable parts. The only way I could make it even more future-proof is to run a friction shifter on it.

I just bought a relatively decent folding bike, a Tern Link C8. Have no idea how repairable it is but it is definitely simpler and better made than my previous bike which was a lectric xp lite which was just getting worse and worse after getting about 800 miles out of it. So I definitely feel like bike makers are following auto makers with this stuff and it sucks.

What I was hoping for was for electric bikes to get cheaper, lighter and more efficient as time went on but it feels like the opposite. Those ebikes are like 3 grand still while the shitty heavy and obtusely designed "cheap" ebikes still cost as much as a decent normal bike. Im happy avoiding ebikes for now which are just glorified motorcycles that still cant keep up with shitty impatient drivers.

The additional complexity and manteinance needed by ebikes is the major factor that scares me, more than price.

I want to do as little manteinance to my bike as possible, to be able to do it on my own, and ebikes don't look like something that would allow me to do so, at the moment