It only took the public 27 patient years of waiting, but Nike has made good on their promise of self-lacing shoes featured in Back to the Future 2. On November 28th, the shoes, christened the “HyperAdapt,” will be hitting the shelves of select retailers, available to regular non-future folks like you and me.
The shoes, made famous by Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly, really do seem like something out of the future, even decades later in 2016. They have a pressure sensor in the heel of the shoe. When you step into the shoe, your heel hits the sensor, the shoe runs its very own algorithm(!) telling the fishing-line cable laces how much to tighten. If the algorithm leaves you wanting a little more or less pressure from the laces, there are a couple buttons on the tongue that will let you manually adjust tightness.
Here’s a tweet from Nike’s PR director shedding a little more light on the look of the shoes and the release details:
And while they might not look like the uber-high high-tops from the film, they certainly embody the spirit of “Power Laces.”
Take a look at the shoes as imagined back in 1989 versus their 2016 real-world application:
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The future is now.
But before you get too excited, getting yourself a pair or buying a pair as a holiday gift won’t be as simple as strolling into your local shoe store and asking for your size. Releases like this are generally limited, which is to say that there almost certainly won’t be enough pairs to match demand. So you’ll have to move quickly, possibly waiting in line for hours before shoe stores open to get a crack at them. Or you can try your hand buying them on the secondary market for a big mark-up.
Which leads us to the biggest question still remaining – the price.
Nike has remained mum on how much these iconic sneakers will actually cost, so while they might be “available to the public” in spirit, the reality might be that they’re “available to the public” the same way courtside Lakers tickets or a Rolls-Royce Phantom are available, which is to say…expensive. Adding to the speculation and fear of a steep release price is the fact that there’s very little discussion on the Internet as regards price, suggesting that no one has a clue what these things could cost. But you hear the words “future,” “pressure sensor,” and “algorithm,” and “cheap” doesn’t really come to mind.
In any event, the shoes of the future are almost here, and they will be available to those motivated (and possibly rich) enough to acquire them. And, maybe sometime after that, the rest of us.
