Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.
Companies can’t stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.
The problem with LEDs isn’t the bit that emits lights. It’s the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.
Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It’s better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.
The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don’t last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.
If the bulb starts flickering, that’s usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.
The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.
The newer designs that use very long, filament-attached LEDs in a large helium filled glass bulb also work quite well, even in a classical light fixture. The helium filling helps with cooling because helium has higher convective heat transfer than air.
Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.
And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there’s plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren’t necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they’re wearing.
iPhones and iPads famously get slower, laggier, and less useful as time goes on. This is not just because of its use because even resetting one will make it just as slow as before. Sure, as we move forward we get more demanding applications and such, but it seriously doesn’t seem like that scales properly with the ability of the hardware, almost like Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch that isn’t installed on current hardware. It’s apocryphal, I know, but there have been so many people complaining about their perfectly good iDevices suddenly not performing like they used to even after a refresh that makes me feel like there’s at least something to it.
And don’t get me wrong, Android phones seem to do the same to a certain degree. iDevices are just more famous for doing it.
Gonna downvote you here bröder and chip in with the people defending Apple’s products while recognizing that Apple did go through a lawsuit and that they did indeed participate in this shady-ass practice. Whether they still do - who knows, we live in a funny age.
From personal experience, not only is the build quality superior but they do last pretty long. I’ve got 3 devices personally and have had experience with many more.
My SE that’s old as hell now. I’m not gonna say it runs every app just fine, but the OS functions just fine. I use it as a music player now tho and iPhone 14 as my phone.
SE2 was shit, I’ll admit.
I bought M1 Air when they just came out - it has barely slowed down. Admittedly, it was after my 12 year old Acer plastic clunker decided to not wake up one day.
I also just recently used a friend’s pretty ancient iPad for Procreate and that worked just fine as well.
If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple? At least for smartphones there are none. If someone did put a really nice feeling (physically) smartphone in front of me and said: “hey, you can switch everything off with hardware switches and all the apps you’re used to are supported plus the UI and the camera is competent”, I might jump, maybe. Depending on how I could manage my workflow with Linux bc I’m not going to Windows and in this hypothetical scenario if I’m jumping Apple, I’m jumping everything not just the phone.
All that said, I have been giving a thought to all of this for some time and as soon as the time is right for me, I will switch, out of principle. I would love to be able to run some other OS on Apple phone hardware tho.
Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.
Companies can’t stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.
The problem with LEDs isn’t the bit that emits lights. It’s the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.
Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It’s better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.
The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don’t last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.
If the bulb starts flickering, that’s usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.
The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.
The newer designs that use very long, filament-attached LEDs in a large helium filled glass bulb also work quite well, even in a classical light fixture. The helium filling helps with cooling because helium has higher convective heat transfer than air.
Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.
And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there’s plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren’t necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they’re wearing.
I bought about 20 Cree bulbs 5 years ago, 15 are on about 15 hours a day. I’ve had 2 fail in that time.
Not a bad record in my book.
Even the off brands, IKEA, Amazon, etc, seem to last as long. They’re all in open fixtures, so no cooling issues.
Please elaborate on the iTrash slowdown thing. I have an idea of what you’re referring to but want to make sure I’m right.
iPhones and iPads famously get slower, laggier, and less useful as time goes on. This is not just because of its use because even resetting one will make it just as slow as before. Sure, as we move forward we get more demanding applications and such, but it seriously doesn’t seem like that scales properly with the ability of the hardware, almost like Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch that isn’t installed on current hardware. It’s apocryphal, I know, but there have been so many people complaining about their perfectly good iDevices suddenly not performing like they used to even after a refresh that makes me feel like there’s at least something to it.
And don’t get me wrong, Android phones seem to do the same to a certain degree. iDevices are just more famous for doing it.
deleted by creator
Gonna downvote you here bröder and chip in with the people defending Apple’s products while recognizing that Apple did go through a lawsuit and that they did indeed participate in this shady-ass practice. Whether they still do - who knows, we live in a funny age.
From personal experience, not only is the build quality superior but they do last pretty long. I’ve got 3 devices personally and have had experience with many more.
My SE that’s old as hell now. I’m not gonna say it runs every app just fine, but the OS functions just fine. I use it as a music player now tho and iPhone 14 as my phone.
SE2 was shit, I’ll admit.
I bought M1 Air when they just came out - it has barely slowed down. Admittedly, it was after my 12 year old Acer plastic clunker decided to not wake up one day.
I also just recently used a friend’s pretty ancient iPad for Procreate and that worked just fine as well.
If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple? At least for smartphones there are none. If someone did put a really nice feeling (physically) smartphone in front of me and said: “hey, you can switch everything off with hardware switches and all the apps you’re used to are supported plus the UI and the camera is competent”, I might jump, maybe. Depending on how I could manage my workflow with Linux bc I’m not going to Windows and in this hypothetical scenario if I’m jumping Apple, I’m jumping everything not just the phone.
All that said, I have been giving a thought to all of this for some time and as soon as the time is right for me, I will switch, out of principle. I would love to be able to run some other OS on Apple phone hardware tho.
deleted by creator