That cassette has got to be a pain in a crosswind.

Cool. This means 11 and 12 speed will be cheaper soon. Maybe if rotor gets serious, Shimano will stop resting on their laurels and do something cool, too.

I don't expect I'll reach beyond 11 speed in the short term, myself, but I like knowing that someone is pushing things.

Pootling around town mostly , myself..

yea but that 1 cog lasts a very long time,
and is cheaper to replace than a 10-42 12 speed cassette,
that sole source spanish made 13 will be way up there in price.

Not sure how well just a couple of teeth engaged would handle high power.

Geez man, now that I'm pushing 60, I'm just starting to realize the benefits of the small ring other than when I need it out of desperation. Now they want to take it away from me.

Yeah, but where does the 13th cog fit in. The widest space in gear ratios is usually is between the 11 and 12 tooth cogs.

Nothing against innovation, after all my 1x9 was unthinkable at one point, but more of a question: At what point do those giant cogs begin to weigh more than a front derailleur and another chainring?

You must mean TCO, not replacement. An XG1295 is $385 MSRP.

Find me a new 14-speed Rohloff for even double that. Please. Then show me who will build/rebuild a wheel for it for free.

well I don't know how the 13 speed is made but my 34 tooth cassette is a lot lighter than my 32 tooth was on my 10 speed. Wasn't a solid unit like before. Came held together with a piece of plastic you remove. Pretty neat

I think that is the tough part is spacing because the dropouts have largely stayed the same though maybe a better freehub/driver with a better spaced hub might work out?. But say a cassette like this would be pretty cool: 10-11-12-13-14-16-18-20-22-24-26-28-32 (maybe with some better tweaks because they might be needed for better gearing) I would love something like that on my road bike for sure.

Oh man! I'm going to have to get one of these. It's a whopping 44.444% better than my 9-speed cassette. I don't know how I'll survive without one.

Folks don't seem to realize how badly Shimano (and to a lesser degree, SRAM and Campy) have the bike drivetrain market locked down with patents. Anyone who wants to compete has to come up with some wacky new stuff (or feed off old tech like MicroShift is doing).

It really would be difficult for a new player to enter with a 2x11 system without a ground up redesign that, as the cable-pull parallelogram derailleur has been refined for nearly century, wouldn't be as good. We should be glad when any new company is bold enough to bring a new group to market, even if we won't use it ourselves.

I'd actually like more options for bigger gaps. I like what SRAM is doing with 7-speed for downhill bikes. And doesn't someone have a wide-range seven-speed for eBikes?

Most of my shifts when riding our local mountain-bike system are by two or three cogs each time. So on that particular system I could get by easily enough with maybe just four or five gears at most. OTOH, on gravel roads when there is more time between gear changes it is nice to be able to fine tune to match my cadence.

No problems just patronize your LBS to keep some of your local economy from collapsing...

Thinner chains imply two things: they aren't as robust and wear out quicker, and if you break down in the middle of nowhere, the odds of finding this special chain in stock are very thin.
And hey, if you want more gears, guess what... Rohloff has 14... fourteen gears. So if you're just after the number, Rohloff is your best bet. Oh, wait, NuVinci has infinite number gears.

Just saw this on FB
CeramicSpeed

Here you go.

For what; light duty towing with that 1x13 setup?

I guess. But it looks a tad obsessive and compensating for something. What advantages do these wacky setups give over conventional 21-24 speed bikes? Look att the first gear, I thought the megarange was a huge first gear, I don't know about others but the first three gears are pretty much never used with me, accept the time I was towing my heavy wood display case. That first gear would be handy if mt everest was paved or you come accross a jeep stuck in the mud. Waiting for the rim itself to become a gear/disc brake with some 1x48 setup. These are bikes, not big rigs, I just think hydraulic 32 speed Spicer transmissions are for busses.

I'm wondering if gear changes can happen only at certain places around the circumference of that shredder disc. That would likely be a deal-breaker (or a gear-breaker). And you still have the problem of getting stuck in a high gear if something happens in front of you and you have to bag the brakes without time to downshift. What if your tire kicks a little pebble into that whirligig? Mud? They'll have to fully enclose it.

Cute, and I do admire the innovation, but somehow I can't help thinking it'll come to a sudden stop somewhere in its development.

I have that with most bicycle innovations. Love the creativity but they seem to solve a problem that didn't really exist, was already solved or is solved by an idea with much more drawbacks. It's like they think "the bicyle has been there for so long with little change, there must be a way to fundamentally improve it". That's illogical, the bicycle has been there for so long with little change because it was about finished a 100 years ago.

The bicycle chain is pretty efficient and easy to use. It's a nice intellectual exercise to design something better, but the brilliance of the idea doesn't necessarily make it a better drivetrain.

And the space the cassette use is same as, say 11speed cassette? Narrower cogs mean you have to change all the gear parts to make this work?

The drivetrains we know are protected with patents, so someone can't come in and produce their own drivetrain without enough innovation to make it "different". This is a problem created by intellectual property law - they'd not do this if they weren't forced to.