I'm convinced this happened recently with LED bulbs as well, even though I've found no definitive proof. The LEDs I installed in my house 10-12 years ago are still going strong, but every newer one I've purchased gives up the ghost within a couple of years. And I only purchase brands with a good reputation, like Feit and the like.
The rule of thumb I've found with light bulbs is similar to the Boots Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory), which is you need to spend at least $8-$10 on a bulb to get something that will actually last. Feit is good but its hit or miss on life span, especially when I get them close to the same price and incandescent, often times its the little A/C to DC converter that dies (really need DC light circuits or dedicated converter in the light fixture). I feel its worth spending the extra to not replace them.
Having lived most of my life with incandescent bulbs which you could buy at four for a dollar if you watched for sales, the idea of paying $8-10 for a light bulb is insane to me. I have probably close to 50 bulbs in my house.
But yes, the reasonably-priced LED bulbs don't last any longer than incandescents. I am replacing a few every year around the house. The saving grace is that they generate a lot less heat. I was in a house the other day that still had incandescent bulbs in the bathroom fixures, and could feel the heat from them as soon as I switched them on.
You'd have to do the math, but similar to boots theory, if you're spending 2-3 times as much for something that lasts 5-10 times as long (50k hours for a good LED vs 1.2k hours for incandescent) you will save a lot more money in the long run (lets assume the 4/$1 deals are a thing of the past with inflation and reduction in production). Also cheap DC converters create more heat than the bulbs with decent ones. It's worth slowly buying expensive bulbs, at least start with the most used lights in your house and replace those with the expensive ones. You can keep cheap bulbs in your closets, spare rooms, etc assuming you don't forget to turn them off often (then you should get the most efficient/long lasting or get one with a motion timer).
I actually swapped out my shower light because it got so hot the insulating wire melted and it created a short. Took forever to figure out, but once I did, I got a nice $30/$40 shower light fixture that went right in the same spot and its much nicer now. I'm just glad the short was running through metal wire/fiberglass and never started a fire.
- Lower-quality components (especially capacitors) being used to meet the lower price point. This is by far the most common failure mode I have experienced, it's never the LEDs dying but the power supply.
- Higher-quality LED light is usually result of driving the LEDs harder, causing them to fail earlier.
The LEDs themselves are made in a handful of factories around the World and are usually robust. The power supplies are the weakness. Each bulb manufacturer makes their own, and it's a race to the bottom.
At least you have a fighting chance of fixing your LED bulb, unlike an incandescent.
Usually they’re over-driven and you can jump a burned out LED and scrape off a bit of a resistor to reduce the amount of current going through to (over-)account for the reduced current need.
There is definitive proof. They over-drive the LEDs which is why they die so quickly. If they were under-driven they last much much longer. It's the heat that kills them IIRC.
That design doesn't prove anything about any malicious intent to decrease the lifespan of the bulb, any more than it proves that they're optimizing lumens/dollar for the customers who want it.
Unfortunately, electronics design does not operate outside the bounds of economics. Given a target retail price of ~$1.25/unit -- many of these bulbs are the best design possible.
The existence of poor quality products does not indicate malice -- many buyers demand low end products.
Cost/quality/performance is an engineering tradeoff without a "correct" answer. The answer is up to the opinion of the customer.
I think that argument only holds when the customer is informed about those specific tradeoffs. The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality. They often aren't.
Buyers want cheap bulbs, they don't want crap bulbs. If that means $1.25/unit is impossible, so be it.
> The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality.
This can't be understated. You never know with a bigger price tag if you are actually paying for a better build or just for branding + tidy profit. So you see two light bulbs with similar specs and the pictures on the box look indistinguishable.. unless you have specific experience or knowledge you are often doing yourself a favor to buy the cheaper one. Sometimes things are priced because they are actually better, but too often it is purely branding that justifies the price tag.
Not specific to lightbulbs, but I've also noticed a trend where a more expensive product with a big name and obviously more of an ad/branding budget actually is better for a few years... and then at some random date the bottom drops out and the product becomes almost indistinguishable from cheaper options while the price tag remains the same. Or even increases if they have enough market share and brand recognition.
And sometimes the better quality isn't worth the price. I bought a "Coochear" brushcutter on Amazon for a whopping $125 when my more expensive Husqvarna died due to a spun main bearing. At $125, I didn't care if it lasted longer than the time it would take me to remove the saplings that I needed to. The thing goes through 2" trees like they weren't even there. Yeah, it vibrates a lot more than it should and runs really rich, but it works a lot better than I expected for that price.
I know that I could have gotten another Husq that would work great but I really don't want to spend $600 for something that only gets used a couple times a year.
Or alternatively, the customer simply DGAF about the quality of their $1.25 purchase.
I have $1.25 bulbs in my home. I use them in unimportant locations with infrequent use. They are perfectly serviceable for this use.
> The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality. They often aren't.
This is a big problem for all consumer products. The root of the problem is that most consumers are wholly unqualified to be a judge of engineering quality themselves, few even know how to effectively obtain trustworthy information about quality, and those who do often value their time more than the effort required to do so. For larger purchases, some people who care to be informed will do some research, but I don't really think there's a solution for products <$500.
It is so much more difficult than it used to be to get trustworthy information about the quality of products. Seems like you have to already know of a hobbyist turned youtuber/blogger who has ideally done deep dives into a class of products or at least some relevant product reviews (or has a large subscriber base with active discussion threads).
Even trying to find such a content creator on the fly can be dicey since so many of them are doing paid reviews or at the very least are sent free products + incentives. That, or get lucky googling site:reddit.com/r/[subreddit] [product] to find a thread that isn't too recent, isn't overrun by shills and isn't woefully out of date and full of deleted/overwritten content.
The availability of that information is probably worse than ~10 years ago, but still better than any time in the past before that.
Another problem is that there are just too many products these days. 40 years ago someone might have 5 options for a vacuum cleaner, period. Someone on the internet today might have 500 options. It's just information overload. Someone who really cares to, might go through the 236 options that Consumer Reports has tested [0]
But most people aren't the type of people who would spend a half-hour arguing about consumer product quality on the internet. Most people aren't willing to spend any time to evaluate their options for relatively small purchases beyond the immediate moment of purchase.
