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There's something off about LED bulbs

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#741

Post by michael1999 »

michael1999 wrote: post #479
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go buy high CRI, high quality bulbs right now. Nothing is stopping you. Here is one common vendor: https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/ The issue isn’t that MBAs have cost reduced bulbs for no reason. The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. As a result, that’s what gets produced at scale. > We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire T…

That's not entirely true. I guarantee that someone at Philips is tuning their drivers not just on manufacturing cost, but also to "optimize" lifetime. That you can pay a premium for less "optimized" drivers is as much about market segmentation as it is about BOM costs. As evidence, notice that Philips refuses to sell the Dubai lamp outside Dubai. They are designed for truly long lifetimes, and nobody at Philips want'…

In SaaS this is considered normal. At least 15% of systems cost is the complexity of having different tiers of service, and selectively turning them on and off, and making sure the system is still coherent when intentionally crippled. These are real engineering expenses to make the product deliberately less functional.

What fraction of Microsoft Windows engineering goes into the complexity of picking and combining the feature sets of Windows Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate? It isn't 0.

Engineering that is negative for user-value is routine in big business. It's a big part of what MBAs are for. It is such a counter-intuitive thing to do that it requires special training.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#742

Post by neuralRiot »

garaetjjte wrote: post #624
shagie wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes into the "actual conspiracy - not a theory" category. Veritasium - This is why we can't have nice things - https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy > On 23 December 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would alter the world for decades to come. Present were top representatives from…

Devil's advocate: Incandescent lifetime is inversely related to efficiency, thus Phoebus cartel prevented spread of long-life but inefficient bulbs.

An also should add that color temperature on incandescent lamps play a role on its lifespan, want long lasting lamps? Lower the current (or increase the resistance).

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#743

Post by e28eta »

chongli wrote: post #465
jghn wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? I'm very happy to pay more for that. How does one sift through marketing to get to actual quality? And then how do I know that they stick with the high quality approach? What happens when a brand decides to rest on the laurels of their brand name and start slipping in lower quality parts?

The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? The issue is that LED bulbs aren’t simple devices like incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs have an electronic power supply inside which drives the LEDs at a constant current. Power supply design is a major subfield of electronics engineering and there are all kinds of tradeoffs you can make to optimize…

> The issue is that LED bulbs aren’t simple devices like incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs have an electronic power supply inside which drives the LEDs at a constant current.

Not all of them! I was very surprised to open up my generic outdoor patio LED bulbs and find two strips of LED filament wired directly to power.

AFAICT it’s just enough LEDs in serial for 120VAC at 60 Hz to be “good enough” that they survive for “long enough”.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#744

Post by leobg »

walterbell wrote: post #737
leobg wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great site. I wish he had an English translation. But I forgive him. This is what the Internet should be! Individual people who do one thing really well. So happy to see that this still exists online.

Could we improve discovery of these indie sites via HN or elsewhere? A standard tag for Algolia/web search could work, if any spam comments with the same tag were flagged.

That would be the benevolent Engelbart version of AI, wouldn’t it?

Instead of dumb capitalism, clickbait and silly content marketing driving human activity, to have an AI that saves us from wasting our time figuring out the answer to questions that have been answered long before. And then, instead, points us to those questions that have not yet been asked, much less answered. What experiments have not yet been done.

After all, no GPT-4, no matter how many billions of parameters, could tell you what the best battery is in the world if it wasn’t for that one human dude in his garage in Denmark, or Latvia, or wherever, who actually tested them all.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#745

Post by SoftTalker »

stasmo wrote: post #314
SoftTalker wrote: post #133

LED bulbs suck. CFLs suck. The light is poor and though they cost an order of magnitude more than incandescents did, they are built so cheaply that they don't last any longer. And they qualify as hazardous waste when they need to be disposed of. At times I've seriously considered trying oil lamps. The only LED bulbs I buy now are the "filament" types. Their bulbs are filled with helium so heat transfer is good, and t…

It feels weird to me to see this kind of comment on HN. I’m sure somewhere out there on the internet there are people complaining that computers suck because they bought a few cheap computers and didn’t have a good experience, so they’re assuming all computers are bad. Without any sort of detail about what brand or what it was used for and why it was a bad experience, it’s really not adding anything to the conversati…

Whatever brands in the major stores. WalMart, Target, Lowes. They all suck. I don't care to keep notes and do research on light bulbs, for fuck's sake. My spare time is worth more to me than that.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#746

Post by mcguire »

aimor wrote: post #633

Some people seem to have different memories than I do of what it was like buying lightbulbs before LEDs came out. I remember incandescents also having a variety of color quality, lifespan, and decorative options. I remember having the choice between bargain bin bulbs and luxurious options, making sure to outfit a room with a single brand so everything looked the same, realizing it's more difficult to read with this o…

Can you get 3-way LEDs? I have some 3-way lamps and I've been casually looking for bulbs but haven't found any.

(Yes, I know I could search online and order them. It's not that important.)

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#747

Post by amalcon »

alexsereno wrote: post #735
t0bia_s wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have 2 year warranty. Return it. My dad did it so often that they refuse to sell him a new one in that shop. What an irony.

Why? That strikes me as odd, since the manufacturer is the one who eats that warranty cost.

Assuming that the retailer can actually get a refund or replacement from the manufacturer (for some products, only the consumer can actually do that), usually they just replace the item or the wholesale price. They don't replace the retailer's gross margin. Thus the retailer ends up eating the cost of things like stocking and actually processing the warranty. For e.g. a one-person operation, that means extra work for zero profit.

It's usually not that much, but I can see why they might eventually be upset about it.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#748

Post by cataphract »

olyjohn wrote: post #576
jimbobjim wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Phillips bulbs I bought have a ridiculously high failure rate. About half have failed within 6 months. Much worse than the supermarket own brands, or cheaper ones from Amazon.

The Philips Hue bulbs somehow never burn out. I have about 30 of them in my house, and the oldest ones (5+ years old now) are working as well as the new ones that I have bought recently. They are the only "smart" thing that I have in my house, because they're the only thing I've ever hooked up that worked with 100% reliability. They don't require an internet connection, etc. I never have connection problems, never ha…

Same. I have half a dozen hue bulbs from 2016 and none hav failed. The ones I have from Innr have not failed either. 4 of them are outdoors.

With Philips spinning off the lights division, I don't know the current quality.

On the other hand, I've had others (non smart ones) starting to flicker or otherwise just dying after as little as one year.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#749

Post by neuralRiot »

jimbobjim wrote: post #529
BizarroLand wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent probably $150-$200 for 7 packages of "high CRI" "long lasting" phillips brand LED bulbs last year, for a total of 28 bulbs. 6 of them have failed in less than 9 months, either flickering so badly it could cause an epileptic seizure or just straight up dying on me. It's maddening.

The Phillips bulbs I bought have a ridiculously high failure rate. About half have failed within 6 months. Much worse than the supermarket own brands, or cheaper ones from Amazon.

The best i have found are unbelievable from Ikea, the’ve been in daily use for almost 2 years already.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#750

Post by dredmorbius »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #150

I hate how many of these things aren't limits of the technology but rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer. We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things. We know how to mass-produce rectifiers pretty much ever since diodes existed. We know how to cool mass-produced objects in compact spaces. But because we apparently can't have nice th…

It's a variant of the Market for Lemons problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons>

Discussed numerous times on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=market%20for%20lemons>

To get a market for lemons, the following characteristics are required:

- Nonuniform products or services with widely-varying quality.

- Expensive quality assessment.

- Poor information on relative quality, whether by distortions by sellers or lack of sophistication of buyers, or both.

You find this all over the place, with one notable example being tech recruiting (which appears multiple times in the HN/Algolia search above).

This is also a characteristic which leads to worsening product quality as formerly niche markets expand. Bicycles, audio equipment, and electronics are classic instances of these. A larger market is inherently less sophisticated, and more easily distracted by spurious or irrelevant characteristics of products.

Another tendency is for cargo-culting and fads to develop. That is, as products or services become more complex, a follow-the-herd mentality appears, where (apparently successful) influencers drive follow-on behaviour. Often, of course, the influencers and early-adopters themselves have a poor understanding or capability of distinguishing between high- and low-quality offerings. Given random selection, some will emerge as either successful or lucky over others.

There are some mitigations. In the case of used-car markets, for example, the emergence of vehicle history services (e.g., CarFax), reduces informational asymmetries. In the case of appliances, certification services (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) and review organisations (e.g., Consumer Reports) aided greatly, as did uniform trade practices such as implied warrantee of fitness and generous return policies (both of which reduce buyers' risk).

As for your assessment of AI's future market, that seems highly probable to me, and would greatly dampen actual positive prospects within the field.

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