Well, if exercise is the goal, you can still use the pedals and get your exercise. Just like your TV analogy.
Yeah, I often use “Just Ride” mode, which should be trivial to let work when offline. If they haven’t done that bare minimum, there’s no excuse.
Nobody’s expecting to see instructor videos or leaderboards when offline, but not even being able to see the current resistance level on your own bike is far more crippled than there’s any legitimate reason to expect.
Yeah, that’s very true. They’re always updating and improving its functionality… hopefully they can add this in the future.
I think that is counter to their business model. They want it to be a boat anchor without a subscription.
Very true!
Of course, all the other exercise equipment I’ve owned in my life (weight bench, Nordic Track, elliptical machine) did become boat anchors in my home pretty quickly. It’s easy to be suspicious or resentful of the subscription business model but it’s the whole reason this bike is (for me) a game changer. It’s kind of the best of both worlds between a gym membership and a home workout. The extra expense is totally worth it for my health as long as the thing gets used.
I also feel like my legs could tell me the approximate difference between 30/45/60 resistance or 70/90/110 cadence.
So part of this still seems to me like saying lamps suck because they don’t work when the power goes out. :D
P.S. I realize Kolbex has had mechanical issues with his cycle which does suck for sure. We’ve been living with a small click in our bike for a few months. It comes and goes.
The difference is that most indoor bikes in that price range work with other options. Sure they may not be like what Pelion is doing, but they offer their own unique take.
Maybe it helps to put the cart before the horse. With Peloton, we know we’re not buying an exercise cycle. We’re subscribing to a home fitness content platform that happens to come with a bike. :)
My daughter recently made fun of us grown-ups because all we ever talk about at parties is Peloton instructors. And she’s totally right.
Our neighbor is in love with Matt Wilpurs. My wife showed me Ally Love’s nine wedding outfits. On the morning of the Pan Mass Challenge, I showed my friend and his PMC teammates the video Emma Lovewell posted while riding under the Bourne Bridge. I love that Jess King is on social media cheering for commuters who are racing to catch the Staten Island ferry. (I don’t watch but I love that she’s doing it.)
I think it’s all pretty silly but I’ll be damned if they haven’t got me exercising regularly for over half a year!
I followed the Peloton Reddit for awhile and it’s same thing, everyone talking about the instructors. I watched some of the samples online and they seem just as bad as every other fitness program’s classes (not actually bad, but nothing special). People listening to music and telling you to adjust your resistance or change your cadence.
What am I missing?
Heh, you’re not missing much. It’s just a community that you gradually get to know and then you can compare notes with friends about which ones you love and which ones you hate. (I’m rolling with Leanne Hainsby’s yestoyou crew; fuck Cody Rigsby.) It’s like a cast of characters from a reality show that you can workout with and follow on social media if you want. Leanne and Ben are engaged!
Like I said, it’s silly but they keep me exercising. I don’t follow them on social media but my wife follows a few that she likes so I get a sense of who they are.
What I want is a 30 minute ride that has about 5-6 minutes of commentary from the instructor. A few stretches, occasional pep talks and adjustments to resistance/cadence, but mostly shut up while I watch a video or listen to a podcast that interests me. It’s nice to have them leading the workout but I definitely don’t need to spend the whole ride with an instructor.
I didn’t see this until now, way later. I don’t think it’s an unfair complaint, @rrmorton ! It’s a very expensive bike; I don’t expect to get access to live content, but I do expect it to show me my resistance and so forth and even be able to track my history of exercise. I mean I can absolutely still pedal it, no argument there, but I could do that on a muuuuuuch cheaper bike, too.
How the hell is Peloton worth $42 billion?
Leanne Hainsby is worth $42 billion.
Again, how the hell do they have 14,000 jobs in the first place? They make an exercise bike
Wonder if they will finish that Ohio factory, they started last year.
I don’t know what the right number of employees is, but “a lot” doesn’t surprise me. They make a bike, which requires hardware support as well as in home delivery and setup. The bike has a tablet running their custom software that needs to be designed, maintained, and offer customer support, along with mobile apps to support it. All of that is in service of live and recorded instructor content from at least three different studios, not all in the US, as well as (pre-pandemic) some small number of people attending those workouts in person at their facilities. It’s not just a video stream, it’s also managing live performance tracking reported and shared on the platform to the other customers taking the same class “with” you, whether the instructor is live or if you’re taking a previously recorded class.
There’s a lot going on. Is 14,000 employees globally crazy? Maybe! But I have no idea how to set an appropriate expectation.
I don’t think that’s far fetched at all.
Don’t forget manufacturing, engineering, application development video production, sales, marketing, support, sourcing and logistics for shipping, managment, executive, AND spanned across the globe if I recall correctly.
You could triple that number within ten years if they grew that product line. But make no mistake, to go from initial design to production and sale of a high end piece of gear that needs to appeal to a higher spending market, you can’t have a 10-15 year product iteration timeline. It needs to happen yesterday. And you throw lots of people at that problem.
I always figured there was a hard limit on their market. On top of a hardware costs the subscription fee is pretty hefty. And the hardware is almost useless without it. That’s a pretty strong deterrent.
Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column for today has a blurb about Foley stepping down. Every time I read Money Stuff it makes me feel like the entire world happens behind the scenes.
Here is a fun activist deck from Blackwells Capital yesterday that leans heavily on the theme of “come on man even you don’t want to be here”:
In a sense, the pitch here is straightforward. Blackwells does not think that Foley is very good at running Peloton. The stock market does not think that Foley is very good at running Peloton, in that the stock is down 80% from its highs last year and spent last week below its 2019 initial public offering price of $29. (It’s up today.) And Foley does not think he’s particularly good at running Peloton, at least if you believe the quotes that Blackwells selected here. If someone else takes over the day-to-day running of Peloton, or the process of selling it to a better owner (and Blackwells is also pushing for a sale), then Foley will have more money (because he owns a lot of Peloton stock) and also more free time (because he’s not running Peloton). It is no fun to do a job that you’re not good at, particularly when doing that job costs you money . If you can get in a room with Foley, or just lob a PowerPoint deck at him, and explain “hey, everyone is mad at you, you’re not having fun and it’s making you poorer,” that’s fairly persuasive and maybe he’ll listen. He did!
In another sense, Foley seems to have done almost enough to insulate himself from this sort of pressure. He has super-voting shares, not quite enough to be a majority but enough to swat away pesky activists in most situations. A lot of his net worth is wrapped up in Spotify, so he has economic incentives to do the value-maximizing thing, but not all of his net worth is wrapped up in Spotify, and one of Blackwells’ big complaints is that Foley sold $96 million of Peloton stock in 2021 even while professing optimism about the business.[2] One effect of selling $96 million worth of stock while the stock is high and declining is that you end up with $96 million, which dulls your incentives to make the stock go back up. If the stock never goes back up you still have the $96 million. Most people who have $96 million and are the CEO of a public company would prefer, all in all, to make the stock go up and have more money. (His remaining stock is worth something like $500 million at yesterday’s closing price.) But it is not an absolute necessity.
So, loosely speaking, if Foley found it enjoyable to run Peloton poorly for the rest of his life, he could pretty much afford to, and pretty much nobody could stop him.
I’m back with another petty complaint. For a long time I’ve used the “average resistance” stat to gauge when to move up in my workout. Like, if it says my avg output is 200 I’ll aim for 201, then when it flips to 201 aim for 202, etc. A few weeks ago they just removed that stat from the user dashboard. No explanation that I could find or even acknowledgement until I saw someone either on reddit or twitter post an interaction with customer service saying they didn’t know about it and it had to be a bug and they were passing it on, etc. Well it’s been a month and it’s still gone, so I have to assume at this point it’s not coming back. So there you go, not only does the bike basically stop working if you pay your fee, even if you do pay they will just take useful shit away from you for no reason and with no explanation and there’s nothing you can do about it. Life under software as a “service”. It’s not the biggest deal since now I just step up every two weeks, since that’s about what it would have been anyway, but it still annoys me.
