@Madockawando posted:Let’s be honest here, the end of the hand held remote is not about what the customer wants. It’s about what’s best for a company that has lost the capacity to manufacture and support these devices.
This is certainly true IMO. It's pretty clear that a significant number of customers are not enamored with the idea of using their phone to control their trains, me being numbered among them.
OTOH, I can't be too hard on MTH for this decision. They do have to weigh the expense of redesigning the remote to use new parts against any potential lost sales based on discontinuing the remote. For many years in aerospace I faced similar issues of parts obsolescence, and the solution was to buy thousands of parts that guaranteed that we could continue to build a specific product for many years into the future. However, the price for this practice was high, and I suspect the profit margins on model train products just don't allow for such extravagant expenditures. This is likely the reason for the limited lifetime of stuff like the remotes.
