Originally Posted by
Barrettscv
The polished TB14 look great also. They actually need more attention to keep clean, the polished finish doesn't hide a transparent film of road grime as well as the anodized.
Yup, that's the main cosmetic advantage I see to hard-anodized rims. I've definitely seen that with the originally-polished-finished rims on my blue bike pictured above.
It's possible that the disadvantage of cracking is extremely low-added-risk at this point, so the doesn't-show-road-grime outweighs everything else now. One of the things I'm trying to figure out in this thread.
Originally Posted by
davidad
Does the term new and improved ring a bell. No advantage to the end user, but an excellent selling point to the uninformed.
That certainly could have been a selling point in the 1980s, but hard-anodized rims largely disappeared by the late 1990s, I think mainly because the lack of advantage and increased risk of cracking became commonly accepted. So I'm less sure that "new and improved" would be the selling point for the second resurgance of hard-anodized rims. That's why I'm wondering if there is new information (less risk of cracking than previously thought) or perhaps a new implementation process.