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The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)
- josho 10y agoNot altogether different from tech. today. Ie. Year 1 nobody owns a light bulb, so sell an incredibly efficient bulb. Year 10 everybody owns bulbs so cheapen the product to increase sales. While today we have incredible free service to grow market, then when the market had matured and growth falls and lock-in is complete reduce service to monetize. Somethings never change.
- userbinator 10y agoThe article mentions CFLs and LED lamps, which are definitely subject to the same engineering pressures: This would result in increases of candlepower of 11 and 16 percent respectively.” That boost in illumination, he suggested, “would be acceptable to all flashlight users” despite the fact that the higher current would shorten not just the bulb’s life but also the battery’s. The cartel’s justification for these changes was that at the higher current levels, the bulbs produced more lumens per watt. Alas, more current means not only more brightness but also higher filament temperature and therefore shorter life. I have no doubt that LED lamps could be engineered to last essentially indefinitely --- well past the 100+ year record of early incandescents[1] --- but most consumers are lead by the advertising to seek higher brightnesses, which are achieved by running the LEDs at life-shortening higher currents and temperatures. Newer ICs with small feature-sizes are subject to far more current density and electromigration stress, to the point that CPUs are not expected to last more than a few years, whereas older ICs may remain functional for many decades. Memory and storage densities are also subject to the same effect, where it seems "capacity and speed is everything" and data retention and endurance have been sacrificed. NAND flash started out at 100K+ cycles per bit and 10+ years retention; now it's more like 1K and 1 year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-lasting_light_bulbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-lasting_light_bulbs
- TeMPOraL 10y agoHonestly, I'd be fine with optimizing products like that if two things were true: - close-to-perfect recycling infrastructure; i.e. all the stuff that breaks down and is thrown away actually gets reused to create a new generation of stuff, with minimum additional input of energy and material - civilization was a stable thing; making things throwaway depends on ensuring there's always a replacement to buy - which will be sort-of the case only until the world goes to war again (and/or western economy goes seriously belly-up), at which point we (those of us who survive, that is) will be cursing previous generations for making all advanced technology break down after a year of use, often on purpose Alas, those things are not true, and so I despair over the wastefulness of what "the market decided".
- khedoros 10y ago> Honestly, I'd be fine with optimizing products like that if two things were true: If you're talking about technology being expected to break down and be cheaply replaced on the scale of single-digit years, it sounds like a never-ending nightmare. I'd need to add two more points, at least. - Strict upgrades (that is, there must be nothing about a new version of a product that's worse than the one before it); if one feature/technology was present in the older version of something, the new version must provide the same capability. I'm thinking of the old hardware I keep around because of "That one thing that only runs in Windows 98" and "That one thing I can only flash over a parallel port". - A mechanism to automatically, securely, and privately image the new machine with the previous machine's configuration and data. The nests I build on my machines feel like home. Given only your first two points, I still wouldn't buy a machine that I didn't expect to last at least 5 years, and preferably 10.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI was thinking primarily about appliances - lightbulbs (dumb or smart), washing machines, cars, cellphones / smartphones, etc. Those two points you added don't apply to most of them. That said, I'm not sure if I agree with the first one. At least not completely. I'd like to have some ability to recover old/special features but I wouldn't mind if it required some extra work (like tracking down that motherboard model that still has parallel port on it). In the reality where all technology is being obsoleted fast and my two points hold, whatever you want to program over parallel has probably broke down already anyway. As for the second one - we don't have anything like that even today in wide use, and we cope :). On Unix you end up moving your dotfiles; on Windows I used to spend an hour or three for setting things up "my way". Personally I don't expect a new machine to immediately feel like the old one - but I do expect to be able to make it so.
- metaos 10y agohow many people does it take to screw in an everlasting lightbulb?
- romanr 10y ago0. Because it either don't exist or already screwed in by someone else years ago.
- Qantourisc 10y agoAnother neat side effect, if it's everlasting, it will probably not be mounted in a changeable fixture.
- kevenwang0531 10y agoThe counter-argument to our fear of planned obsolescence here is the ridiculous speed of technological improvement in LEDs relative to incandescent lighting. LED's cost per lumen falls by a factor of 10 every decade (see Haitz's Law), while a user's actual lighting needs may never exceed 800 lumens for an standard A19 bulb. Any attempt to form a cartel in this market would be swiftly defeated by ever-falling unit economics. Far from a cartel, we should let the government create a standardized LED lifespan rating based on the actual needs of consumers. For example, if we know the average renovation cycle for single family houses in the US is ten years, then we should make LED bulbs that are rated for 10 years. This way, manufacturers can deliver these products at at the most affordable price point, and consumers for the most part won't have to worry about replacing their lights ever again.
- Spooky23 10y agoLEDs suck less, and are much better than garbage CFL, but are still more expensive and less versatile than the old bulbs, particularly when you need a bright bulb.
- wtallis 10y agoFortunately, you only need a bright bulb for flashlights and for fixtures that are intended for incandescent bulbs. For general interior lighting, a large array/string of relatively dim LEDs is usually fine.
- _ph_ 10y agoNot sure why you would think anyone today would use an incandescent bulb in a flashlight. This is where LEDs just took over. I have a pencil sizes LED flashlight that matches the brightness of my Maglite only when I put it in power-saving mode - otherwise its about 10x as bright.
- srtjstjsj 10y agoexcept that many LEDs flicker horribly because they have bad electronics, and the consumer has no way to judge quality.
- doener 10y agoFor 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out. Now that's coming to LEDs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12103244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12103244
- fastaguy88 10y agoWhat I would like to know is, how did Thomas Pynchon know about this when he wrote Gravity's Rainbow in the early 1970's? Research pre-internet. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/10/07/planned-obsolescence/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/10/07/planned-obsole...
- bcoates 10y agoPlanned obsolescence would be changing the base on the lamp every few years so that people would have to buy new fixtures when they can't buy replacement bulbs anymore. Author is not using that term correctly. The actually interesting story is about the market failure where customers have no choice but to prefer the thing they can measure (bulb life vs cost) over the more important thing they can't measure (electricity cost over life of bulb).
- whoopdedo 10y ago> Planned obsolescence would be changing the base on the lamp every few years so that people would have to buy new fixtures when they can't buy replacement bulbs anymore. Have you bought a light fixture recently? That sounds like the new state of affairs. Aided by government regulations that require new lamps not be able to accept older "inefficient" bulbs, there's been an explosion in the variety of sockets. I've converted every lamp in my apartment to LED except for one, because it uses a GU24 base that is very difficult to find in anything other than CFL.
- superuser2 10y agoWhich government? I have not seen this in the US, and I purchased quite a few lamps in the last couple of years. If it happens here I'll be extremely sad. CFLs and LEDs have an extremely strong negative effect on mood for me. Fortunately I can still buy halogens, which aren't quite as cozy but suffice.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y agoSounds like you react to bad LEDs. Good ones have stable power supplies that don't ripple, and phosphor coatings that produce fairly even frequency distributions. LEDs for room lighting are still relatively immature, but they're getting there quite quickly.
- ced 10y agoPlanned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design and economics is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer functional after a certain period of time. - Wikipedia Seems fitting to me.
- ars 10y ago> Of course, given the collective ingenuity of the cartel’s engineers and scientists, it should have been possible to design a lightbulb that was both bright and long-lived. And not energy efficient. The article lightly touches on it, but the physical reality is that the better the electrical efficiency the less time the bulb lasts. It's a tradeoff that has not changed in 100 years. So yes, the cartel did mandate 1,000 hours - but they also saved untold amounts of electricity over then next 100 years.
- _ph_ 10y agoThis is the one big thing missing in most reports about the lightbulb lifetime. Even consumers profited via power-savings from this lifetime agreement.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoSeems like an important point, but I think it would also be worth to see a comparison of energy saved by end users through increased efficiency, and energy used on additional manufacturing, distribution and sales caused by the need to replace bulbs more often. This is a general point about all "eco" technologies too - a device is not "eco-friendly" if it's total manufacturing and distribution energy costs are higher than the "eco-unfriendly" alternative.
- yuubi 10y agoConveniently, the retail price includes the direct expenditures on energy to make and transport the item to the store. I recall the electricity rate being around 0.08 USD/kWh around here a while back, so 1000h of 100W consumption would cost $8. I don't remember exactly what 100W plain light bulbs cost, but it certainly was a lot less than that.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI'm talking about energy costs and environmental damage, not the dollar price. Contrary to popular opinion, the retail price rarely if ever captures the environmental impact of a product.
- ffk 10y agoThe longest running light bulb is in Livermore, CA and has been running since 1901. It's installed and maintained in a fire station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light
- imperialdrive 10y agoyou made my night!
- aaron695 10y agoObviously an environmental disaster if everyone had these. But still, a quaint thing.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoFrom the Wikipedia article > The Centennial Light was originally a 30-watt or 60-watt bulb Why? Everyone, where I'm from anyway, now has CFLs and LEDs, mostly, and the environmental disaster rolls on.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- russdill 10y agoDon't forget though that there really is a direct correlation between efficiency, brightness, and lifetime. Your electric stove makes a great long lasting light. Just turn all 4 burns on full. It will last virtually forever.
- Neil44 10y agoYes it's not such an immoral decision as it is presented. Light bulbs that have energy consumption in the KW range because people want them to last forever would not be good.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nnain 10y agoWow, thanks for posting this and to the investigative journalist. Now I know whom to blame for all the heartburn that I (and family) had from the continuously fusing bulbs.
- frik 10y agoRemoving light bulbs from retail market and enforcing mercury based CFLs - that was the latest act of such a cartel. Good the the paradigm shift to LED was quicker and different then they hoped. Now Philips, GE and OSRAM are a shadow of its former self, and little players in the LED industry. And Asian build LED are of a often of a higher quality and last longer. (well probably all LEDs are built there anyway, even the one from OSRAM that whats to sell that part of the company) And Asian built traditional light bulb are available and last longer than the older cartel build bulbs.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> And Asian build LED are of a often of a higher quality and last longer. I'd like to believe that. I got burned by so many cheap Chinese LEDs (quite literally, too - some common failure modes of LED bulbs have them getting almost as hot as incandescent ones) that now I'm willing to pay premium to be sure the bulb won't turn into disco stroboscope after two days of usage.
- barking 10y agoI miss the times when every light fitting was the same (one size, bayonet style). I don't know how many different types and sizes of fittng we have. It's a pain replacing bulbs now. I preferred the light from the old incandescent bulbs too and if they give off a little heat, well living in the temperate zone we need a little heat after dark.
- stuaxo 10y agoThe light is better, but the heat is usually not where you want it.
- barking 10y agoWon't it amount to the same thing as a heat source anywhere else in a room, with convection and radiation?
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoModern heat pumps are three to four times more efficient in their use of electric power than simple electrical resistance heaters.[1] I have a 7.1kW heat pump, it uses a little over 1.79kW of power generate that heat, so a thermal efficiency of 3.96:1. Any light bulb, whether it's incandescent or CFL or LED produces heat a 1:1 thermal efficiency. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
- brianwawok 10y agoDo many people have heat pumps? Most people I know in the Midwest make 100% if heat from burning natural gas. So in the winter not a huge loss (just the delta on cost between electricity and natural gas). In the summer obviously you pay double..
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoHeat pumps / reverse cycle air conditioners are very popular in Australia, but the temperature here is fairly moderate, even in Tasmania where I live there are few places where it's below zero for more than the over night period. Heat pumps don't work so well sub zero.
- dandare 10y agoMilton Friedman famously claimed monopolies/cartels would not exist without government assistance and that there are only 2 examples of private monopolies that lasted long period of time (De Beers and NYSE). I suppose he was very wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU
- yummyfajitas 10y agoThe article suggests Friedman was right - this cartel was very short lived. "Powerful and influential though it was, the Phoebus cartel was short-lived. Within six years of its formation, the cartel was already starting to struggle." Friedman was also right that the cartel existed primarily due to government assistance: "GE’s licensing of its basic lightbulb patents gave rise to yet more alliances, most notably the powerful Patentgemeinschaft (“patent pool”)..."
- dandare 10y agoMilton Friedman famously claimed monopolies/cartels would not exist without government assistance and that there are only 2 examples of private monopolies that lasted longer period of time. I suppose he was very wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU
- svantana 10y agoRelated: I have noted over the years that incandescents with dimmer switches basically never burn out, and those with normal switches tend to break during the first second of being switched on. That's led me to the following thought: would it be possible to build a bulb with a built-in fade-in, either via bandpass/lowpass filtering or some sort of fading mechanism?
- randallsquared 10y agoI promise you that bulbs on dimmer switches do burn out. I just bought a house and the kitchen light on a dimmer switch burned out within a week of my moving in. No idea about the age of the bulb, so it's not very good data, but... Sadly, it's apparently still a crapshoot whether any given LED bulb works without flicker on any given dimmer of unknown design; I have only found those with flicker so far.
- bearbin 10y agoI have heard that such devices already exist. They are a NTC cap that goes over the end of the bulb. http://donklipstein.com/bulb1.html#ss http://donklipstein.com/bulb1.html#ss
- alex_duf 10y agoI can't believe an LED that adapts the colour temperature to the time of the day like F.lux does isn't a standard yet. LEDs are great but boy are they agressive to the eyes. (Yes that's a bit unrelated, I figured I'd rant and hope some poeple starts mass proucing it thanks to my message)
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoI have no trouble getting hold of 2700K LED bulbs here in Australia. I agree though, the cold white 4500K or higher bulbs are really only suitable during the day. Every bulb in my house, CFL or LED, is 2700K.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y agoThe difference between a 2700k and 3000k bulb can be quite large, too. I prefer the ones I've gotten labelled 2700k, 40w equivalent. Better LED bulbs also have better power supplies, and therefore less ripple.
- lucaspiller 10y agoI just ordered a some from Osram Lightify that you can control the colour temperature and brightness. I'm going to set them up with Home Assistant to do exactly this, and at €20/bulb (for GU10) they aren't too bad (compared to the coloured Philips Hue which are €60/bulb). However as you say, it would be great if the bulbs would just do this themselves.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI changed my apartment recently and replaced all bulbs with Hue. Thanks for another idea to my list of hacks I'm trying to implement on them. Hue has a nice RESTful API that works over local network - I so far managed to get Tasker on Android to talk into it, and I'm moving to build a more advanced control centre on a Raspberry Pi.
- Bromskloss 10y agoAre LEDs aggressive to the eyes even if you manage to get them to have the same colour as ordinary light bulbs?
- linkmotif 10y agoGreat eponymous documentary about this and planned obsolescence http://youtu.be/-1j0XDGIsUg http://youtu.be/-1j0XDGIsUg
- known 10y agoI personally like CFLs in the right context, but if you want instant light, dimming or cooler light, they aren't great. https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/energy-saving-light-bulbs.html https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/energy-saving...
- cmurf 10y agoBlackbody radiators and millions of years of evolution are hard to beat. I like the energy efficiency of CFL and LED but I do not like the spectral power distribution or the decay rate and ensuing hue shift of these light sources. And it's not something only experts notice. If you have multiple bulbs in the same proximity, one fails, whether replaced under warranty or you just buy a new one with identical color temperature specs, it'll look different from the others. Recapturing heat loss from incandescent to make them more efficient, maybe even on the order of today's LEDs seems more promising to me than arresting decay rates and/or the hue shift problems.
- twic 10y ago> heat loss from incandescent to make them more efficient, maybe even on the order of today's LEDs seems more promising to me This is already happening - you can apply a 'hot mirror' coating to reflect infra-red radiation back into the bulb, while allowing visible light out. This is a very old idea - here's a patent from the early 1960s which states that the basic principle was already in use: http://www.google.com/patents/US3174067 http://www.google.com/patents/US3174067 And another which applied it specifically to coating a halogen incandescent light bulb: http://www.google.com/patents/US3209188 http://www.google.com/patents/US3209188 Here's a report / puff piece from 2013 asserting that this technology is currently taking off and claiming that "by 2018 the efficiency of a hybrid halogen incandescent light bulb will exceed that of the current compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) and equal light-emitting diodes (LEDs) on the market by 2023": http://www.smithmillermoore.com/Pdfs/technicalarticles/3-6-13_DSI_LTB_The_Rebirth_of_theIncandescentLightBulb.pdf http://www.smithmillermoore.com/Pdfs/technicalarticles/3-6-1...