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#lightbulbs#phoebuscartel#plannedobsolescence

Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated

Technology Connections

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  • Recommended by 9 people: 9 on Hacker News.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

2.3M views3 years ago9 recommendations

HardwareHistory and cultureElectronicsHistory of computingRetro computing

Technology Connections explains the engineering tradeoffs between light bulb lifespan, brightness, and efficiency, debunking simple planned obsolescence myths.

It's a hot topic. Oh, wanna learn about high pressure sodium lamps? Have I got a video for you. youtu.be/U1dMlVwUsrA What about that weird fluorescent adapter thingy? youtu.be/JFJO3emhOyY Technology Connextras (my second channel where stuff goes sometimes) youtube.com/@TechnologyConnextras Technology Connections on Mastodon: mas.to/@TechConnectify This channel is supported through viewer contributions on Patreon. Thanks to the generous support of people like you, Technology Connections has remained independent and possible. If you'd like to join the amazing people who've pledged their support, check out the link below. Thank you for your consideration! patreon.com/technologyconnections

Why it's here

9 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as a thoughtful, engineer's perspective on the Phoebus cartel and the physics of incandescent bulbs.

samaton Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)”

There is an excellent video about Lightbulb Cartel by Technology Connections, highly recommended if you want an engineers perspective, with no 'great conspiracy' hype. link to this video
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audunwon Hacker News • Recommends

On “List of the longest-lasting incandescent light bulbs”

Technology Connections talked a lot about this and the supposed planned obsolescence of light bulbs link to this video TL;DW: (if I rember correctly) Bulbs with shorter lifespans are generally more energy efficient. There was good reasons to not making bulb that last forever.
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TaylorAlexanderon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Anatomy of a Smart Bulb”

Honestly that story is really not as simple as people suggest it is. There is a tradeoff between bulb life and brightness and standardization may have been good for the industry. Technology Connections does a thoughtful deep dive in to this story in this recent video: link to this video
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PaulKeebleon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Apple's Blue Ocean”

…em very red shifted and quite dim then there are bulbs that are very old still around, but they don't produce much light and never did. The harder you drive the filament the better the light properties but the quicker it died. The industry choose a point for trade offs as a standard. You can watch about the history of it on Technology connections. link to this video Saying that the Dubai Philips LED bulbs really do last a lot longer since they have twice the filaments and run the filaments a lot less hard as a result (as well as being more efficient). It is possible nowadays to make an LED that wont fail anytime soon although LEDs are already much better than incandescents in that regard but there are…
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mmkhdon Hacker News • Recommends

On “How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court”

Nice video from the well known channel Technology Connections: link to this video => It's complicated. Yes, there was a cartel, but it was not all bad. There were legitimate reasons to go for 1000h light bulbs.
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Youdenon Hacker News • Recommends

On “How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court”

It wasn't as simple as them wanting to make more money: link to this video Key points from an AI summary: - Incandescent bulbs had to balance factors like light output, efficiency, and lifespan - hotter filaments produced brighter, whiter light but reduced bulb lifespan. - Longer-lasting bulbs were less efficient and produced dimmer, yellower light, so they were not simply "better" products being suppressed. - The 1,000 hour target was a reasonable compromise that balanced these competing priorities, not necessarily a sinister plot. - Even after the Phoebus cartel dissolved, the 1,000 hour lifespan remained the industry standard for general-purpose incandescent bulbs.
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torginuson Hacker News • Recommends

On “East Germany invented 'unbreakable' drinking glasses”

Actually Technology Connections made a great youtube video on this: link to this video The gist is that by running bulbs at a lower power, you can greatly prolong its life, but the downside is that it doesn't heat up as much, and since emissions spectrum correllates with temperature, ends up being much worse at converting electricity to light, which ends up being not worth it.
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RulerOfon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory”

It's true that the Phoebus cartel arranged to have light bulbs die after a certain number of hours, but bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption. The cartel-defined lifetime limit sits very close to the sweet spot for all of those metrics for incandescent bulbs. Technology Connections explained this well in a video about a year ago: link to this video
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mreomeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “You have been mislead about lightbulbs”

For an even deeper dive into this topic... Technology Connections: Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated link to this video
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eroppleon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Infrared may no longer be a punchline, as IEEE approves 9.6Gbps wireless light”

> It's been such a consistent problem for so long that it has shades of the Phoebus cartel about it. Which wasn't what you think it is, and is invoked by people who don't understand it. link to this video
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abhinavkon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Apple's Blue Ocean”

> Solid state batteries with 10k charge/discharge cycles are never going to happen for the same reason incandescent bulbs are purposefully manufactured by every single lightbulb manufacturer to fail when they figured out a hundred years ago how to make them last forever. Technology Connections has an interesting video on this. link to this video
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roywigginson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion”

And even lightbulbs have to make tradeoffs between efficiency and lifespan. Yeah, all else being equal the efficient bulb is better, but it's quite rare that all else actually is equal. link to this video
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dtx1on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production”

> There are some original Edison bulbs that still work, yet you'd be lucky to get a year out of a modern incandescent. link to this video > Same thing happened to LED bulbs. Because LED Bulbs cook your LEDs and are stupid design. Get a permanent LED fixture with decent passive cooling and they will last for decades. Adapting LEDs into the same Plug as Incandescent lighting just does not work.
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artimaeison Hacker News • Mentions

On “Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening”

The Phoebus cartel didn't collude just to make the light bulbs have a shorter lifespan. They upped the standard illumination a bulb emitted so that consumers needed fewer of them to see well. With an incandescent you have a kind of sliding scale of brightness:longevity (with curves on each end that quickly go exponential, hence the longest lasting light bulb that's so dim you can barely read by its light). The brighter the bulb, the shorter the lifespan. link to this video
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