The New Nike Hyperdunk+: Fresh Kicks, But At What Cost?

I’ve been a sneaker whore ever since I can remember, but over the last 5 years or so my high-top obsession has faded considerably. Maybe it’s just me, but rarely does a shoe ever come out that’s worth getting excited over anymore. When a new Eastbay catalog would hit my mailbox, I used to go crazy. I would pour over the basketball shoe section for hours, taking a magic marker and circling all the fresh kicks on my wish-list. I would research each shoe like I was preparing for a graduate thesis, but it was all worth it to chop down that list of “do wants” to the pair I would actually buy with my not-so-never-ending cash-flow.

Lately though, most new arrivals in the shoe section don’t really do it for me. Either they’re too blah or too outlandish for me most of the time. Usually, the shoes that appeal to me are the throwbacks like the Jordan 11’s or the Reebok Pumps. This probably speaks to a couple of things. 1st, they’re shoes…much like the dunk contest, at some point everything that’s possible has already been done. 2nd, (and this is probably equally true) now I’m basically like an old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn when it comes to this kind of thing. Nike and Adidas aren’t marketing their products to people my age anymore than Wiz Khalifa and David Guetta are in the music industry…with all that being said, behold the new Nike Hyperdunk+.

Yes, I know, I know…there’s LeBron front and center in another 1 of my posts, but I swear this isn’t a LeBron post. (Although it is interesting that Nike is using LeBron as the front man for a product that isn’t specifically part of the LeBron brand i.e. his Nike Air Max LeBron 9’s.) The shoe is the latest in Nike’s line of “Nike+” products, which allow users to track their performance on their smartphones or computers. It was introduced a few years ago, and to get it to work you had to buy not only a specific running show but also an insert that you had to purchase separately and put in the shoe yourself. It was basically a glorified step-counter, but in recent months Nike has made a new push with a series of “Fuelbands”, improved Nike+ technology, and now this.

To start off with, the shoe looks dope. When the above ad aired on TV during the NBA playoffs for the 1st time a few weeks ago, that was my singular thought. I didn’t even notice the “+” part of the commercial. LeBron’s and D-Rose’s shoes the past few years have been nice, but they didn’t catch my eye like this. When our most recent Eastbay catalog came over the weekend, I came to find out that the shoe had the Nike+ sensors already built into it. (Honestly, this may have been done in previous Nike+ shoes for all I know, but it was the 1st I ever heard about it.) In addition to tracking your mileage, these supped-up Hyperdunks have the capability to track your vertical leap, you quickness in steps per second, and what Nike calls “NikeFuel,” which is some made-up metric for how much you hustle apparently.

"Do you guys know how to post your vertical to Facebook?"

While that’s all well and good, it’s not something that I’m necessarily interested in. It’s a hot shoe, but at what cost? How’s $250 for the shoe with the Nike+ sport pack already included sound? If you want to personalize your Hyperdunks at NikeiD.com, that will run you $290…yowzers. I would rather run up Route 40 to the Nike outlet store buy 3 or 4 or 7 pairs of shoes for the same price. Fortunately, you can buy the Hyperdunks without the fancy-shmancy Nike+ package too. That will still cause you to pony-up a criminally expensive (yet more normal) 140 bones, but even that is more than I’ve ever spent on a shoe in my entire life…and that includes the NikeiD shoes that Krissy and I have treated ourselves to the last 2 years. Nike may be the cleverest company in the world in terms of marketing, but even they’re not smart enough to get that much money from me for 1 pair of sneakers. Still, I am curious as to how popular these Hyperdunk+’s will be. I’m sure I will see some rich kid wearing them walking through the mall or something in the next 2 weeks…tracking his hustle while he slurps a Cinnabon, no doubt.