Originally Posted by
JonathanGennick
You aren't missing anything.
Sellers are often wrong, remembering only the year in which they bought the bike, which of course is not the same of a model year.
I do care a little bit about year when I buy used frames sight unseen on eBay, because frames from the late 1990s and early 2000s often are built around a shorter top-tube and longer stem geometry that I do not like. Given a year, I can sometimes find the geometry on the manufacturer's web site.
In mountain-biking you sometimes have yearly changes in suspension design and shock technology that matter, and the model year can be a shortcut to discerning just what it is that you are dealing with. For example, I recently learned of a change in the 2013 year on RockShox brand forks that makes shortening the travel a more difficult and more expensive task than in prior year models.
I used to know the year of the frame I'm currently riding, but can't bring it to mind right now. 2002 or 2003, I think. Parts are all a hodgepodge of newer parts that were never spec'd on the bike to begin with, so I can't really assign a year to the bike as a whole, but only to the frame.
Yeah, if there are differences relevant to your needs, it makes sense. Of course, for me, I think things have gone down hill as far as sizing. Used to be any 23" sport touring frame would be just fine for me... Now, I typically ride a large, but sometimes large sizes differ by manufacturer. And for suspension frames, things are a little more complex, and don't fit into my simplistic approach.
Originally Posted by
steve_cay
Model year is important to me! Because by buying "last years model" I have save a couple of hundred dollars twice now
. Both times it was just a colour change.
That is the one time when it matters... In the shop it will either be marked down, or if you know, you can ask "That is last year's model, what sort of deal will you give me?" And, if many people weren't so hung up on buying this year's model, that wouldn't happen... So, even though I don't understand it in many cases, I guess I like other people to be hung up on the model year, or the shop would have no incentive to mark down the previous year's model.
