What are your thoughts on older bikes?
Are there specific eras where particular types of bikes, road racers for example, peaked?
Does new always mean better?
We know that technologies always reach a point where they effectively become 'solved', in that our understanding of them is complete and there is no real way to improve upon them. But technologies related to cycling in general seem to be continuously evolving and improving, or is that just an illusion?

Built in obsolescence has been around for a long time now and exists in all things manufactured, both physical and digital, think about the rock solid durability of the early i-phones compared to the fragile and coded to die modern equivalents, and even though they are now mass produced almost exclusively by slave labour in China using the cheapest possible materials, the prices keep on rising. Has bike manufacturing reached that stage yet? Of course if an i-phone fails it's unlikely that the owner will suffer potentially catastrophic injury, whereas if a bike were to fail then it could easily result in death, so perhaps most reputable bike manufacturers realise there's a limit to how cheap and 'built to fail' they can push it.

With everything we buy in some way being designed to fail at some point, thereby encouraging further consoomption, is this true of bike frames and components?

Also manufacturing techniques have changed a lot over the past century or so, is a hand built frame really going to be better in real terms than something assembled by am efficient machine? What about design and even over-design, we all know examples of bike that seem just about peak for a particular purpose, just as we often see memes bike on here that have clearly been overthought.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone with a vintage bike or those who simply have to have the latest cutting edge stuff.

What is the apex bike or frame, brake, gearset or wheel?