As others have said, it’s very much a US/UK/Canada thing going 1 x whatever.
The rest of the world think we’re mental taking a typical 2 x 10 setup with a great range of gears and limiting ourselves with less gears or playing around with expander cages, aftermarket sprockets, big gaps between gears etc etc…I’ve only ever lost the chain from the chainset once and that was on a 1 x setup!…never dropped the chain from the front of a double chainset.
I’d consider 11 speed when it trickles down purely to go 2 x 11 and keep even nicer/closer ratios than currently but the whole 1 x craze has passed me by, just not that interested….and I’ll always buy Shimano over SRAM!

Yes please… a 10 speed 11-40 XT from Shimano @ £30 and I’ll be prepared to go 1×10.
I simply don’t understand how they’ve let that market pass them by.

It’s not the market that’s passed them by, it’s their own perfectionism that prevents them from releasing a 10sp 11-40.
They would have to launch a new rear mech and then you’d get all sorts of incompatibilities that they’d have to explain.
Easier to do it at 11sp time.

njee20 – Member
All bets are off really, as with 9 speed in 1999 and 10 speed in 2011 they did XTR/XT/(S)LX at the same time, so you could instantly mix and match.

9 speed XTR M950 was available in 1996. 9 speed XT didn’t appear till M750 in 1999.

10 speed XTR was available in late 2010. 10 speed XT and SLX was shown off in April 2011 (Sea Otter), and not available till late 2011.

I imagine they will do the same this time around.

After-market is a tiny part of Shimano’s business. And for all you fretting about them not keeping up with OEM stuff, just look at all the bikes this year that come with Shimano brakes where they had SRAM last year.

9 speed XTR M950 was available in 1996. 9 speed XT didn’t appear till M750 in 1999.

10 speed XTR was available in late 2010. 10 speed XT and SLX was shown off in May 2011 (IIRC), and not available till late 2011.

M950 was 8 speed, M952 launched in 1999, it was a cosmetic change to the 950 groupset, and made it 9 speed. Along with XT and LX.

All the 10 speed groupsets were MY2011, not saying they were all literally released at exactly the same time, indeed they announced XT and SLX before XTR.

Forgot about the M950/M952 distinction. For some reason I always think the first Olympic XC was on 9 speed.

I don’t consider the 10s groupsets to be the same MY, they were available exactly a year apart. Like I said, same this time.

This thread got me thinking I might go 2×11 when I rebuild my bike with XTR cassette and shifters. I then checked the price of the 11sp XTR cassette compared to the 10sp XT and realised 2×10 will be just fine.

This thread got me thinking I might go 2×11 when I rebuild my bike with XTR cassette and shifters. I then checked the price of the 11sp XTR cassette compared to the 10sp XT and realised 2×10 will be just fine.

It was riding a demo Orange 5 (1×10 c/w Hope T-Rex) that made me realise that while I’d ‘decided’ that my next bike would be 1×11, in reality it didn’t need to be.

Since bought a FS and put 1×10 on with a Hope 30T front and 40T T-Rex works great and will be far cheaper to run (based on destroying 3 rear mechs in 2 years along with wearing out couple of cassettes per year and many chains).

AlexSimon – Member

They would have to launch a new rear mech and then you’d get all sorts of incompatibilities that they’d have to explain.

Nah, the standard mech actually works almost well enough- it’d only take a small tweak and it’s pretty likely they could just run the entire line like that rather than having parallel models. But at worse it’d be no more confusing than short and long cages (which they make more confusing than it should be with their secret codes)

I don’t consider the 10s groupsets to be the same MY, they were available exactly a year apart. Like I said, same this time.

Nope, second half of 2010 for all 3 of them…

Edit: although that was the old groupsets, they revamped the groups in 2012, but they were 10 speed before.