[emb-fit]

It's a $2k training bike. You could spend $1k and get a really nice brand new road bike and a smart trainer that controls resistance like a Wahoo Kickr Snap (or several others) for ~$500.

I just don't get why the Peloton thing is so popular when you can get a smart trainer and a bike you can actually take outside for sooo much cheaper. You could even sign up for Zwift and a Trainer Road subscription and come out waaay ahead of $50/month.

The protocols coming out of these things have become pretty much a standard as well. Get an ANT dongle for your computer and the data can be consumed from so many apps, even an open source project like Golden Cheetah. Or just read the data from a head unit that already supports it.

[stefan_]

I have a ton of road bikes and a high-end smart trainer but I'm under no illusion that for someone not looking to ride outside ever, a purpose-made exercise bike is a vastly superior option. Even the smart trainer companies have figured this out and are making fully integrated exercise bikes.

One obvious reason is that no one cares what the exercise bike weighs and it will never be exposed to dirt or rain. That allows you to make a drivetrain that can trivially last past the useful life of the equipment without any maintenance ever. Meanwhile on the road bike you strapped to the trainer you have a chain, cassette and chainrings for no good reason - all of it ends up feeding into a variable resistance unit anyway!

Similarly putting a road bike you have used extensively on the trainer back on the street generally means doing a complete overhaul - you sweat salt water all over it and don't want your alloy handlebars to break in half because it corroded underneath the bar tape.

Ceterum censeo: we should focus on fixing the reasons that many people, particularly women, feel unsafe riding a real bike outside that they would rather stare at this screen going nowhere inside. Most of them without the mandatory two box fans blasting a hurricane their way, it makes me die inside just seeing that.

[nogabebop23]

>> you sweat salt water all over it and don't want your alloy handlebars to break in half because it corroded underneath the bar tape.

Of all the ways to crash - mechanical failure, operator error, 3rd party - this is the one that keeps you up at night? We come from very different cycling worlds...

[sombremesa]

It's not just dirt and rain. Inexperienced bicyclists have a very real chance of getting hit by a car. I'd pay $500 on my worst financial day to avoid that.

[dehrmann]

> I just don't get why the Peloton thing is so popular when you can get a smart trainer...

You're missing the point. It's not indoor cycling, it's more like at home spin class or soul cycle. The customer base is pretty different, and the experience is a lot of what they're looking and paying for.

[rconti]

Right. You can easily argue the Peloton bike isn't worth $2000, but of course the content costs more to produce than Zwift content. Whether you think that's worth it or not is up to you as a consumer.

[aesclepius]

> I just don't get why the Peloton thing is so popular when you can get a smart trainer and a bike you can actually take outside for sooo much cheaper. You could even sign up for Zwift and a Trainer Road subscription and come out waaay ahead of $50/month.

You'd be surprised how much twiddling and research you need to do to find a correctly sized bike and which smart trainer (elevation? resistance? etc?) to get something that will work for the average person. It's the same reason people go for iPhones or Macs or anything else that 'just works', the time cost for getting to where one can actually use it vs. just unpacking a box w/ a 'good enough' smart bike means that a shiny package like a Peloton will always be preferred for a large chunk of the population.

[inopinatus]

I train at home on a no-name steel frame I built up myself with spares scavenged or traded at a swap-meet, sitting on a second-hand (non-digital) Kurt Kinetic resistance unit, total build cost ~ $250, excl. my own labour and home workshop.

Honestly prefer training this way to the gamified Zwift experience, there's something deeply off-putting about gluing my eyes to a screen when I'm meant to be focusing on 4x5 intervals. I have a Wahoo Kickr; I hardly ever use it.

I didn't have any prior wrench experience, this was a project in part to gain some. All I had were some Youtube videos, a copy of Leonard Zinn's The Art of Road Bike Maintenance, and some basic tools. I did, however, already know my fitting dimensions.

The bikes I race on are what you'd expect though. More expensive than my car.

[emb-fit]

Go to any half decent bike shop and say you'd like to spend that much on a bike/trainer and they will bend over backwards to make sure you get exactly what you want and need. They will very likely even throw in a custom fitting using all the special tools they have at their disposal.

Not sure what twiddling you are doing with resistance and elevation, smart trainers pick the resistance based on what the app tells it to do in real time.

By no means can a 'large' chunk of the population afford $2,500 up front plus $60/month.

With a real bike on a trainer some people might even decide to try riding outside, who knows...

[rootsudo]

The Peloton is really a great bike, I seek them out whenever at gyms, hotels, etc.

The price isn't that bad of a deal for someone inside all the time wanting a great bike to workout and the classes.

Thankfully, I'm kinda a nomad so I haven't done it yet, though the past few months I've been stuck in one location and debated about it.

hard

Try to find one! They're fun and good. It's all fake motivation and such but it's really good if you follow the yellow brick road and do it 2-3 hours a day.

[viraptor]

> You'd be surprised how much twiddling and research you need to do to find a correctly sized bike and which smart trainer

Yeah, I'm surprised. People come into a bike shop and come out with a reasonable bike unless they're really looking for something special. A Kickr stand and a bike which fits you "just works" in my experience. What exactly do you think an average person would need to do beyond that?

[sukilot]

How did our parents survive with their stationary bikes in 1970?

[diiaann]

Road biker here. I used to go to Flywheel classes and have done some Peloton IRL in NYC. I also own a Wahoo Kickr and have a Zwift subscription.

I get the appeal of Peloton. First, Peloton is fun. Zwift is so freaking boring. I listen to murder mysteries while on Zwift because I think it's so darn boring. I only do it because I feel like it's a more effective workout. And cost wise, I already have a bike. Second, I know tons of people who don't ever want to bike outside. It's too dangerous or too much logistics.

[pc86]

Because people don't want to ride in poor weather? Because the terrain is inhospitable to their current fitness level? Because the terrain is inhospitable to any fitness level? Because they may only have 45 minutes to ride and want to spend the full time riding? Because they live in an area with a lot of pollution? Because they have medical issues where they worry about getting stuck away from their home? Because they just like tech or just don't like being outside?

There are plenty of completely legitimate reasons.

[solumos]

The one thing that bothers me with ANT is that it's supposed to be an "open" protocol, but in reality it's this proprietary thing that Garmin has locked down. In my experience, there are a lot of hoops to jump through just to get a basic app set up (all of their example code appears to be ~5 years old).

It makes me wish there were an open, real-time, fitness data project that had more easily usable SDKs for these kinds of things (along the same lines as Golden Cheetah).

[faet]

I bought a $300 magnetic resistance bike, cadence monitor ($20), and a heart rate monitor ($40). The Peloton subscription is $12/mo for the app which I use on my phone. The only thing I'm missing is 'resistance' and 'output', but for roughly $1600 in savings I'm fine with it.

The classes are fun and they also include other things like strength, yoga, running, etc. There is no way to get classes around me for $12/mo or even $12/session.

[walrus01]

'really nice' road bikes don't start at $1k. More like $3k. $1000 doesn't buy much these days, from the perspective of a serious road cyclist it'll be some barely usable thing with Shimano sora or worse level components on it. And will weigh over 20 pounds.

Someone who knows what they're doing with road bike mechanic stuff can probably piece together a decent dedicated indoor trainer bike for $1000. Using a combination of used and new components.

[StavrosK]

I have a $150 bike for commuting, and it's fantastic. I don't worry about getting it stolen, and riding it is hard because it's heavy/has shitty components, which is exactly what I want from a bike.

Since my commuting distance is fixed, I want the ride to be as hard as possible, otherwise I don't train effectively enough. I should probably trade it for an even shittier one , to up the difficulty level.

[greyhair]

It really comes down to what your goals are.

Are you riding centuries on a regular basis? Yup, $3000.

Are you just out riding to get some fresh air, sunshine, and exercise? $500 is plenty.

It's heavy? I am only riding twenty miles. Oh, and it has inch and a quarter tires, with a wee bit of tread, and I cannot remember the last time I got a flat tire.

As I opened with, it all depends on your goals.

[sukilot]

You don't need a $3000 bike for an indoor trainer. Everything that makes a road bike expensive is irrelevant or counterproductive in a trainer.

[jzoch]

if you're willing to buy used you can get incredible road bikes for 1k. I just bought a used 2016 Giant Advanced SL2 for 1.2k. It was > 4k at the time it was purchased.

[monocularvision]

Because it was 111 degrees today.

[rconti]

I'm a frequent road and (less frequent) mountain cyclist, and I've got a Peloton (just did my 500th ride on it on Friday AM, in fact).

I've attempted to answer this question before for others, but honestly, I've only ridden zwift once, on someone else's setup, so I can't compare how "good" the experience is.

That said, despite my involvement in the cycling world, I still have no idea how to Zwift. I know I need a bike, a trainer, some kind of device to play the 'game' part, a display, and sensors. Presumably the smart trainer has power built in, but I don't know if I would want BT, or if I'd want ANT and then an ant dongle for my computer/tablet. I know the words Zwift, Watopia, Sufferfest, TrainerRoad, and about 37 others, but don't know the relationship between them. I don't how how the whole ecosystem fits together, what I download, who I pay, and from watching others struggle with it, it's pretty clear there's a non-0 learning curve.

I know for a fact that I COULD figure it out, but that doesn't mean it's for everyone, or all cyclists, or all cardio enthusiasts, or all people into spinning. From the cycling groups I'm in, whenever Zwift comes up, it seems like people are always discussing what components to get to work best together. I'm sure once you get the 'right' components it just works, but it sounds fairly fiddly for newbies.

I also hate riding a real bike indoors. When we had a mag trainer, my wife and I NEVER swapped the bikes out; she wanted me to do it, and so the 'wrong' bike was always on the trainer, and it always felt so damn fragile to me. I'd definitely want to use a dedicated bike for a smart trainer, not one I try to ride outside.

Another (admittedly minor) factor is size. I actually realized that I physically cannot fit a bike+smart trainer in the space our Peloton bike goes in our workout area (with a Peloton treadmill and Precor elliptical).

I'm pretty active in a handful of Peloton FB groups, and it definitely feels like there's a tendency for folks who use Peloton and ride outside to head towards Zwift for their indoor training, but there's also a significant percentage of people who went the other direction, or tried Zwift and didn't like it/found it boring/etc. The video game competition aspect of it looks like a lot of fun to me, but not enough to bother investing in a setup.

So, that's my 2 cents. While I didn't personally make the purchasing decision, I've made a lot of similar ones -- pay a bit extra for something that just works, where someone already did the research and made the decisions for you, and you don't need a new hobby or project to make it work. The same reason I use Apple devices, the same reason I bought a Synology instead of building my own NAS.