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Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

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Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#171

Post by mathgeek »

somenameforme wrote: post #166
mathgeek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. At the end of the gen Sony had lost a billion dollars on the PS3 last I read about it.

They lost money on the console itself, but were already profitable after accounting for software, accessories, and so on by 2008. [1] The console was released in late 2006 and was a beast of subsidization in part because of the heated blu-ray/hd-dvd war which now seems quite quaint. The modern business models are just really taking the consumer for a ride. If either company maintained the previous business model, the…

AFAIK the profitable quarters your link refers to were after they made all the hardware changes that rolled back the decisions we’re talking about. Wikipedia has many source about it from the main article and highlights the one you linked.

As an aside, I don’t really care about the collusion claim.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#172

Post by toast0 »

Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #9
freediddy wrote: post #4

I've never had LED lights last anywhere near the purported 5-7 year timeframe. The worst ones are the small decorative ones with the tinier screw part that my house seems to have an inordinate number of. Those last maybe 6 months and then they start getting dimmer and then all the lights in the circuit get worse at once. I like LED lights immensely but the idea they last even 2 years is a lie in my opinion.

I bought all new Philip hue bulbs going on 7 or 8 years ago now and not a single one has gone bad. Maybe you're just buying cheap poor quality bulbs? A 100 out of 100 success rate after 8 years.

> Maybe you're just buying cheap poor quality bulbs?

All of my led bulbs that failed were either cheap poor quality bulbs or expensive poor quality bulbs.

I have a hard time determining the quality of a bulb without running it for 2 years, and then it's a little late.

And then you have the mix and match problem. The same model number from the same manufacturer purchased at the same retailer gets different internals. So if you've got a room with 6 can lights, when one stops working properly, you have to search your inventory to see if you can replace just one, or if you have to replace all six. As long as the color is roughly the same, I don't mind a difference between rooms, but it's unacceptable when one lamp comes on instantly and the other five take a moment, or when they don't dim together, etc. I never had this problem with incandescents, as long as you bought the same color type and wattage, you could mix and match across brands. I did have one fixture that had tight tolerances for the fashion shaped large sphere bulbs it wanted, but that was fixable with a copper shim that cost one cent (and some paint on rubber insulation around the edge)

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#173

Post by somenameforme »

pie_flavor wrote: post #170
somenameforme wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The level of subsidization has nothing to do with hardware customization. You can have subsidized retail hardware or customized hardware sold at cost. They both went from high end heavily subsidized hardware to mid-range minimally subsidized hardware at the exact same time. Colluding in this way means they both dramatically increase their profit margins, and obviously does not preclude competition in other aspects. T…

It is not proof of collusion that they abandoned bespoke hardware right as consumer hardware was getting good. That is exactly when you want to abandon bespoke hardware. It is not proof of collusion that neither one lowered prices for the cheaper tech. Both were trying to appease shareholders who were sick of the massive up front capital investment that heavily subsidized hardware caused. Again: both had the same inc…

Since you're ignoring words and just repeating the same fallacies, I'll respond in bullet point format to make it easier for you to read:

- Retail vs customized hardware has nothing whatsoever to do with subsidized or not. You can have subsidized retail hardware, or custom hardware sold for profit.

- Agreeing to collude on one issue that is mutually beneficial does not preclude competition in other ways.

- There have been tens of thousands lawsuits related to price-fixing and other anti-competitive behavior by corporations, and an unknowable of actions that were carried out with no consequences whatsoever, like this one. It happens constantly, because it's highly profitable and the consequences even when caught tend to be negligible.

---

Back to words: Sony and Microsoft were in a prisoner's dilemma with regards to subsidization and high end hardware. If they both collude, then they both see major profit increases and live happily ever after. But if either of them actually competed then they'd end up crushing the other one and take the market, at least in large part, for themselves.

In a competitive environment, this is precisely why you saw heavily subsidized high end hardware be the norm for consoles for decades. Neither could risk the possibility of not subsidizing. Then suddenly Microsoft and Sony stop doing so at the exact same time. It was both extremely overt but also impossible to prove so long as they didn't leave a paper trail.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#174

Post by mathgeek »

somenameforme wrote: post #140
brookst wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people for whom the choice is not “spend $20 every two years, or spend $200 today and never again” but instead “spend $20 today or just not have a working coffee maker”

There needs to be a term for this argument, because I think it's frequently used but generally fallacious and primarily used to defend the indefensible. It's a sort of strawman, in that you're concocting some demographic as something being reasonable for even though that demographic either doesn't exist, or exists in negligible quantities. The pitifulman? And on top of all of this - again, French press. Cheaper than…

… but what good is a french press without a $200 gooseneck kettle? :)

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#175

Post by DangitBobby »

brookst wrote: post #134
xg15 wrote: post #133

> "Therefore, this was done so that people would always need to buy more light bulbs." This is wrong, but it's the type of wrong that cites its sources and hides in the part you'd never think to fact check Just as a general point: I haven't seen a product decision that wasn't sold with some official explanation why it's "really for the good of everyone". Google's Manifest v3 was about reducing performance bottlenecks…

The macro point is that complex systems are complex and have competing priorities, so it’s facile to say “I don’t agree with the decision, therefore any reasoning that supported the decision must be 100% intentional malicious bullshit.” I’m old, I’ve had a varied career, I’ve been in small group meetings in startups and VCs and megacorps. I have never once heard the kind of “obviously this is an evil decision, but he…

People lie. It's what they do. It's childish to assume decisions that magically align with their interests specifically to the detriment of everyone else aren't actually motivated by their interests.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#176

Post by cameronh90 »

psd1 wrote: post #125
cameronh90 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK having separate drivers is, or used to be, the most common set up. I never had good luck with it. Big problems with compatibility, failing drivers, especially with dimmers, plus weird electrical problems like residual glow.

The most common setup for installations by lighting designers, sure. I suspect the vast majority of home led lighting is in lightbulb form, from people replacing incandescents.

I should have said that I meant common for recessed lighting.

They often use 12V MR16, inherited from the halogen days, and are pretty common in houses renovated from the 80s until the 2010s. The other option was GU10 which ran at mains voltage, but they were less common until LEDs became popular.

Recent new builds, flats especially, often just include hard wired fixtures without interchangeable bulbs at all. They often still have separate drivers above the ceiling, with the wiring to the lights being low voltage, but sold as a single unit. But I think that's just so they can make the light itself thinner...

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#177

Post by SCLeo »

As many have pointed out, I think the cartel is just using the engineering perspective for justification. If avoiding racing to the bottom is the goal, the rule could be that "no one can advertise a lifetime longer than 1000 hrs" as opposed to actually limiting the lifetime.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#178

Post by enobrev »

Austizzle wrote: post #152
enobrev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been seeing the misspelling of the past tense of lead (led) incredibly often in the past couple years. It's clearly confusing that lead is an actual word, so it may seem right and likely doesn't get caught by auto-correct, although I assume grammar correction should catch it.

Merriam Webster lists it as a valid spelling, and even uses that spelling in one of the example sentences https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/misled

Mislead is the present tense; Misled, the past tense.

I'm not seeing the tenses being used interchangeably with the same spelling on the site, but I may be missing it.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#179

Post by kelnos »

piguin wrote: post #51
wolfgangK wrote: post #36

BTW, I don't understand why having the driver converting AC to DC inside the LED spots is the default. For a new house, it seems to make sense to me to have at least one external driver for a ceiling of spots, if not one per floor (not one for the whole house because pf the drop in voltage). But 24V led spots seem much less common and I cannot find many reviews. Any idea why it's not more common ? It seems efficiency…

I expected the -48VDC telco standard to become popular as people had more solar, batteries, etc. I guess we will get there the most complicated way possible with usb-c.

This might be my bubble showing, but I expect this would have worked better if DC lighting became more popular 20+ years ago, when many many more people had landlines.

(I suppose a lot of people in the US still probably do have landlines, but I know very few, if any, people who do.)

Then again, my house (built in 2009) is still wired for a landline, but the wires (and the voltage on them) remain unused...

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#180

Post by [deleted] »

j-bos wrote: post #153
saalweachter wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is also kind of an outlier IMO. There will be a scandal where Facebook is caught doing something, and then you get a bunch of people talking about "tech companies", or "Facebook and Google", and then you read the details ... and it was Facebook, with everyone going "well, the rest probably are too".

Outlier in candor.

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