I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars?
This thread is now full of people who, with real lived experience, will tell you that $200 bike served them perfectly well, but downvotes rain in from people who spend five times more than a middle-Americans month’s worth of savings on a bike and won’t hear of anything less.
It’s not often that the class divide on HN is so front and centre, but it is here.
200$ in what year? 1990? Go price out parts even the lowest their at a bike store and see what it would take to get a complete bike. Sure it might be cheaper in bulk but you will be within 30%.
Unlike a bike, where able-bodied individuals can take the trade off buying it for cheap and risking it breaking a weld and having to gasp walk.
People that are handicapped kind of need their wheelchair not to break unexpectedly.
I don't see anything being out of touch here. You can absolutely get a $100-$200 bike, and it's completely fine if your use is casual. You start going up in bike prices when you start talking about more and more serious use of bikes which is what probably users here think of. Road bikes are hyper focused on cutting every gram with the most efficient cranksets, MTBs are focused on shear abuse and you absolutely will destroy a $100 bike in a month if you actually ride seriously.
You just linked to a $118 box of parts (or $217 if you want it assembled). This is an absolutely trash bike.
You can get a nice bike that, while not fancy and might weigh more than it needs to, will last years and be safe provided it's maintained, for about £200-£300 ($260-$400 USD) in todays prices. If you bought a bike for $200 years ago, then this is the price bracket you were buying into, not the cheap shit. You can then get increasingly good bikes as you go to $1000 and beyond.
You seem to be be blithely unaware how shit the cheapest bikes are these days. I've had bikes where the crankset literally sheared off, where the frame's welds have cracked rather than the suspension failing, where the brake cables have snapped, where the chain has snapped, where bolts have rusted, where the plastic twist-shifters can't hold a gear and drop them as you go over cobblestones, where things have broken because the minimum wage supermarket employee who knows nothing about bikes has assembled it wrong. This will be the average person's experience with the cheapest-of-the-cheap bikes, and the only way they'd be happy with it is if they don't really use the bike much, or they keep it indoors and don't cycle in the rain, or there are no hills where they live, and so on.
It only costs a little more for a hard-wearing, all-weather bike. Not thousands more. If the most you can afford are these shitheaps, I feel sorry for you, and I recommend you look for a bike charity in your area that will sell you or give you a decent second-hand/donated bike that has been checked over by a decent bike mechanic.
This thread is now full of people who, with real lived experience, will tell you that $200 bike served them perfectly well, but downvotes rain in from people who spend five times more than a middle-Americans month’s worth of savings on a bike and won’t hear of anything less.
It’s not often that the class divide on HN is so front and centre, but it is here.