I live in Eindhoven, home town of Philips, one of the members of this cartel. Philips is extremely loved here. They're the reason this city is a city at all, they're the reason we're a prosperous region with of lots of innovation (mostly hardware though, so not very HN-fashionable). We now have apartment buildings named after their founders ("Gerard", "Anton", etc), lunchrooms ("Meneer Frits"), the local football stadium & club are named after them, and so on. Statues. Statues! Not of a Great Leader back in some totalitarian past, but of CEOs! Imagine putting an enormous bronze Elon Musk at the SF Caltrain station square. That's Eindhoven. We love us our Philips.
They were crooks. The amount of cartels Philips has been in is staggering. They've been working to screw over their customers since the very beginning. Look it up, any infamous technology cartel from the 20th century you can find, big chance Philips was on it. When cartels went out of vogue they lobbied for regulation with pretty much the same effect - Philips will do anything, legal or not, to keep their margins up.
I really don't understand how easily people whitewash this shit.
The reason they are loved is the major social impact Philips had on the Eindhoven region, mostly positive. You could walk up to Mr Frits during carnival, ask for a job for your husband and he could start the next week, ask any older Eindhovenaar about it. They were considered to be a great company to work for: they took care of houses (one of the Eindhoven suburbs is called Philips town as it was literally built by them for their employees), and the bylaws made maximum employment a top priority (heck, it’s still mentioned in the latest CAO). The local football club was founded by Philips for their employees, the first player in the field was a 4-year-old Mr. Frits.
From the perspective of Eindhoven, they sure were a net gain. For the rest of the world, they sure are in a lot of cartels. But the tens of thousands of people working for Philips-related companies won’t care (ASML, NXP, Signify, Etos, FEI, TP Vision, are just some examples of the Philips legacy that is still felt all across the Eindhoven region)l
You basically described what's wrong with caputalism in general. And I agree. Everybody shits their pants when there is a statue erected for the big leader but somehow noon really seems to care about the impact of big Corp to the same effect which is EXTREMELY troubling
Oh come on. I'll take Philips-built Eindhoven over a similarly sized city in Turkmenistan any day. Plenty corporations are run by crooks but few people in capitalist democracies are afraid that they (or their loved ones) could suddenly disappear without a trace.
I work in the lighting industry. I'm told they have a patent on the concept of attaching a driver to an LED board. We, and many other lighting companies, pay for a license to use that patent.
Light bulbs are a bad example of the dangers of cartels. Incandescent filaments are much more efficient at higher temperature but burn out quicker. In the common case, savings from reduced electricity cost more than offset the increased replacement rate for bulbs in accessible fixtures.
Short-lived bulbs were good for the customers. In a market with perfect information people would have chosen them on their own. Unfortunately of 3 categories of information needed for an informed decision (lifetime, power usage, and light output) purchasers only had a good measure of how often they replaced bulbs. Usage patterns are too complex for improvements in a single bulb to be obvious on a power bill, and human brightness perception is roughly logarithmic so it’s not visually obvious how much brighter different bulbs are.
Whether it was motivated by greed or not, the Phoebus cartel is an example of big business successfully advocating for the interests of the general public in the presence of information asymmetry.
> Their lightbulbs were of a higher quality, more efficient, and brighter burning than other bulbs. They also cost a lot more. Indeed, all evidence points to the cartel’s being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was best for the consumer.
It would have been straightforward for them to manufacture higher voltage, less brighter lamps with a longer lifespan. They didn't.
In how many uses cases is anything other than perceived brightness relevant?
Increased costs to provide something the consumer doesn't want is exactly the kind of thing competition is likely to reduce.
The market doesn't always work but it's also very hard to determine what is wrong and how to fix it. If market equilibrium leads to destroying the ozone, it's easy. But if the market means fewer lumens per dollar (or even per joule), that is less obviously bad.
> Unfortunately of 3 categories of information needed for an informed decision (lifetime, power usage, and light output) purchasers only had a good measure of how often they replaced bulbs.
I may be dating myself, but I have never in my entire life seen a light bulb sold without the wattage displayed front and center. It is by far a more accessible metric than when it dies, by which time I have long forgotten where in time immemorial I bought that particular bulb.
Yes I don't remember the lifetime of bulbs. Except for some pathological examples. So really the only thing we have is power usage which does correlate somewhat with light output.
They could have printed electricity costs on the packages. Instead they artificially limited competition. That doesn't sound like they had anyone's interests but their own in mind.
Incandescent bulbs are labeled and classified by their electricity consumption. It's literally in the product description: 40W bulb, 60W bulb, 100W bulb, etc.
Cost is based on both consumption and efficiency, not consumption alone because with a more efficient bulb you can illuminate a given area with fewer bulbs.
In this case, it actually was. That's what makes it such an interesting study. Anyone who touts the Phoebus Cartel as evidence of cartels being good is an idiot, of course.
I would argue that the current economic system does not plan for maximum longevity
of products. Rather it can be more profitable for an manufacturer for planned obsolescence
or simply make products which does not last that long. As long as they do not get caught that is.
The counter to this is that people, despite saying otherwise, are not actually interested in spending more money for a better product. Combine that with some markets that have relatively short life between product generations and it removes the need to create products that last a long time.
It's more fun and easier to blame corporate greed, but it's rarely the case. More often than not it's just that people want "cheaper" rather than "better".
I am sometimes interested, but I learnt the hard way that more expensive is not a good measure for better. In other words, it's often really hard to find out which product is better even when I'm perfectly OK with paying more for higher quality. That's the problem called "lack of perfect information", and that's something I totally see being abused to death by advertisers/businessmen.
> it removes the need to create products that last a long time.
I think the difference here is intent and effort.
If you're trying for "cheap" (as the manufacturer), you won't care how well it works and don't try for anything more than the minimum necessary in terms of lifespan or quality.
If you're trying for planned obsolesce, you will deliberately make it worse. That's the "planned" part. In this case, the cartel not only tested for lifespan, but FINED members that improved it.
There have always been manufacturers that shoot for "cheap", and while people will call them on it, it's a different story from those that deliberately sabotage the product in terms of functionality.
But I'm not capable of spending more for a better product. All I can do is spend more for a more expensive product and hope it's better. Products are contained (or bought online) and untestable; they're too expensive to experiment with. Having had both an original product and a warranty replacement a year or so later, I can attest that exactly the same product can vary in quality so a review is of no consequence.
When I try to purchase a widget, I can see two products: one in expensive looking packaging, and one where someone just put in some text on Word. One of them costs $25 and the other costs $2.50. It's entirely possible than the $25 will last twenty times as long as the $2.50 product and use a quarter of the energy, so that the resulting cost may even be in favor of the $25 widget.
But I can't make that judgement. It's impossible. To me, it looks the same as if the expensive one has just spent $2.50/product extra on marketing budget so they can pocket an extra $20.
I would spend a little extra for better quality that lasts longer and saves me on my energy bill. But the producers are not subject to me; they hide their information and spend on things (like CEO severance pay) that are not in my interest.
So when I go to the shop, I make the wrong decision every time, because I have no capacity to make the right decision. The product is kept from me; I can either purchase and discover if it perhaps sucks, or not purchase. Those are my choices. I don't have a real choice.
Lack of perfect information is a well-known failure mode of standard economic models. It may be true that people value their inherently scarce time more than they value the improved light bulb buying decision they could make by obtaining more information, but that doesn't mean consumers don't value better light bulbs. It just means there's an inefficiency due to the cost to the average consumer of learning about light bulbs (or whatever product).
Also, you can only compare different products, I haven't seen a company that produces the same model, one with short lived parts, one with long lasting ones. Then I could make a real choice.
> people, despite saying otherwise, are not actually interested in spending more money for a better product
Hmmm, cheapest Mac laptop $999. Cheapest Windows Laptop $199.
Sure PC sales are higher than Mac but isn't that at least one example of people want better over cheaper since plenty of people choose the more expensive (better?) product?
I don't think it's the only example it was just the first one that popped in my mind.
While homo economicus is mocked for being nonexistent there is a reason that perfectly rational actors are used in economic models -- in general people are extremely rational, it is just their priorities are not what you expect them to be.
I'm sure you can find plenty of HNers whose friend groups express strong preferences to buying better. There's just nothing to buy better.
So despite rational acting buyers, if the supply-side conspires (or monopolizes) to reduce options, buyers will continue to buy the overpriced item (and possibly increase prices due to the demand/price curve sweet spot).
Perhaps instead of mocking rational-actor theory we should also model conspiring-actor model where possible.
But then on the other hand philips led bulbs used to be $50 while similar quality IKEA bulbs were $12 at the time.
I really don't have an issue with paying for quality but there's just no reasonable way for me as a consumer to judge quality. I could go by reviews but those are often low quality or astroturfed so it's not really reliable either. Not to mention the cost of spending time to figure all this shit out.
I'm currently looking to buy a printer with no real budget limit, but I'd obviously rather not pay for features I won't use, but if $100 gets me $100 more worth of quality that's not a problem. It has been a horrible waste of time trying to figure out so far. I've already (pretty much) narrowed it down to a single brand. Partially to limit the scope of my quest and partially because I'm using the brand as a proxy for quality. My last printer was the same brand and it had, over a more than 5 year period I think two paper jams and no nozzle clogs or weird malfunctions.
Even given all that it's impossible to narrow it down further. Presumably the $300 printer is better than the $50 one, but there's no real way to figure that out from the information the manufacturer provides. A large factor is cartridge price since over the lifetime of a printer that can easily quadruple the total amount of money spent. Of course figuring out how much ink each type of cartridge holds is basically impossible. The manufacturer provides "pages per cartridge set" stats for each printer, but that info isn't on the page of the cartridges so that requires me to manually cross-reference cartridges to which printers they go with. All of this of course assuming that the page count they provide isn't just a straight up lie. And that's just for one attribute of the printer! what about paper capacity or number of feed trays or color quality for photo prints or wifi connectivity or or or or
I'm basically at the point where writing a web scraper is less effort than doing all this by hand. None of this is worth the time spent if you go by my hourly rate. How is my mother ever supposed to buy a nice printer if an IT professional like me can't even begin to figure it out?
Traditionally the solution to this problem was sales people, but these days it seems salespeople are more inclined to sell you something expensive that you don't need than they are to actually help you find what you DO need. Customer satisfaction doesn't show up on the balance sheet and isn't a key performance indicator either so why bother to optimize for it? If your first sales step is to figure out someones budget and the next step is to try and stretch it I'm distrusting enough to notice immediately. My mother isn't and would come home with a lighter wallet and a very expensive printer she doesn't need with no guarantee it won't be a maintenance nightmare either.
I should be the favorite kind of customer for any store. I don't mind spending more for quality. I make a point of being loyal to stores and brands that treat me well. If you can sell me something I'm happy to own you've got yourself a return customer. But I guess most stores just aren't looking for that.
In any case my next steps will be to contact the manufacturer and visit stores to ask them directly which printer I should get. I fully expect to get fleecing attempts for the most part but who knows, perhaps I'll find a new favorite store.
To some degree you can get products with longer lifespans, if you look at commercial/industrial models. Sometimes you have to sacrifice fancy features though.
I think the reason consumer products mostly suck is that manufacturers have been hiding inflation by cheapening construction. Occasionally it's for weight savings, but I think keeping prices lower is the main reason. People don't realize they're getting vastly inferior products to the one they or their parents had a generation ago, until it's too late.
So true. I've heard for years that the size of our cereal boxes/chip bags/candy bars are decreasing, ever so slightly, while the price remains the same.
Reminds me of that whole frog-in-a-pot thought experiment. If you toss a frog into a pot of boiling water, it jumps back out immediately. But if you put it in a pot of room-temperature water, and slowly raise the temperature, the frog gets acclimated slowly and doesn't notice that sooner or later, he's being boiled alive.
To your point, I noticed that chocolate milk cartons have decreased from 1L to 750ML, yet they kept the same price. Further, the 750ML option was not offered before, and the 1L option is not offered now, which adds to the deception.
I find it most frustrating when you go to a shop and there's two things roughly equivalent you want to buy, one of them is $2 for 200 mL and the other is $1.80 for 180 g.
There's every other kind of trickery in the shops to prevent you from being able to assess the relative value of two products, to render those price comparisons redundant (like the fact that the two products are listed, one $/100 g and the other listed $/kg).
I've just moved to Germany, and here it's almost impossible to buy the thing you want — they always seem to subpackage it into segments so that you have to use more than you want and therefore come back. I thought the marketplace was hostile in Australia sheesh.
(But, 750 megalitres is significantly more than 750 litres.)
If there is such a thing as planned obsolescence of a product, why do we not require it to be listed on the packaging and/or specs? Why not also include hefty fines for products that do not have this information listed cleary (like nutritional info), listed incorrectly, or simply fail on avg before the "POdate"?
I just read an interview with Adam Minter who wrote a new book called, "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale" which addresses this.
He was talking about putting a "durability" tag on clothing and other items which point out how long they will last. For instance, for clothes, how many wash cycles can this shirt take? How long before the materials start to breakdown? This would be on all clothing and textile items and then you can let the consumer decide if they want the less expensive shirt that lasts 10 washing cycles, or the more expensive one that lasts 50 or 100 cycles.
He also talked about the paradox of the secondary smartphone market. Apple's products are a great example. The iPhone takes a bit of work to to even change the battery, so now the life of the phone is almost exclusively tied to the battery and how long it lasts. Most people just toss it when the battery goes bad and upgrade to the newest version.
For the people who can actually change the battery, it's created an entire secondhand market for their products. One that is incredibly useful to consumers and the techs who are able to keep the phone going once the battery dies. For Apple, it's almost an affront to their practice of voiding warranties if you open the phone up and actively discouraging the whole notion you should be able to repair your own phone instead of having to upgrade it once the battery is dead.
It was a really cool interview and Adam brought up a lot of other interesting things about our "disposable" culture.
The fixed battery increase the overall durability and reduces materials over a design where there was a compartment that could be opened.
Apple does battery replacements inexpensively relative to the cost of the device, and they supply batteries to 3rd party repair shops.
They have also explicitly declared their intent to increase useful life of their devices as much as possible.
The mantra that their devices are intended to be disposable itself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it leads to the exact behavior of consumers prematurely replacing devices rather than simply having the batteries replaced.
> The fixed battery increase the overall durability and reduces materials over a design where there was a compartment that could be opened.
> Apple does battery replacements in expensively relative to the cost of the device, and they supply batteries to 3rd party repair shops.
How long does such a replacement take, and why would someone need to leave their phone in the hands of a third party in the first place?
Back when most phones had replaceable batteries, it was just a matter of ordering a battery online and plopping it in. The extra materials needed for a battery door or lid are negligible (and significantly less toxic to manufacture than PCBs and electronics) compared to throwing away the phone outright.
Last time I had it done with my current phone, it was done in less than 15 minutes.
Extra materials are not negligible - at the scale of the iPhone, even 1% of additional material is vast.
In any case, is not only the extra materials that are the problem, it is that phones with a battery compartment are much more fragile, harder to waterproof, etc, and so they fail sooner anyway regardless of whether the battery is changed.
Battery compartments are a red herring. It is already easy and economical to replace an iPhone battery.
People discarding otherwise serviceable phones because they have been misinformed about the ease of battery replacement is the real problem.
> People discarding otherwise serviceable phones because they have been misinformed about the ease of battery replacement is the real problem.
When you spend 100% of your time in a technical field, and deal with people who are technically savvy, you think everybody is capable of "easily" replacing a battery, or knowing that it can be done relatively easy.
There are millions of people who are completely unaware that getting your battery replaced is an easy thing for someone who knows how to do it. What do most non-technical people do when their iphone battery starts dying a lot faster? They don't google, "iphone battery repair" or look for a local repair shop to do this, they take it right back to the Apple store. What do you think the Apple store employee is going to tell them? "Hey this battery is dead, you should probably just upgrade the phone."
Some electronic components, switches, plugs, relays, lamps, usually have a listed number of cycles they can withstand before failure. Back when I worked in the industry, some of these values were surprisingly low.
Another possibility is that unplanned obsolescence is part and parcel of chasing bigger margins, and the companies with the biggest margin win out organically.
>I would argue that the current economic system does not plan for maximum longevity of products.
Of course not. And you don't want that. If you want quality, you can get quality but you'll have to pay for it. Are you willing to pay $500 for a quality drill, when a cheapo $40 drill is all you need? What's wrong with that?
Here is the section in Gravity's Rainbow which tells the tale of Byron the Lightbulb (the longest-burning lightbulb) and his troubles with the Phoebus Cartel:
https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html
In a book full of strange meandering asides, this was among the most memorable.
I'm hoping someone clever here has read a book about the cartel and can answer this question: The wiki page doesn't go into too much detail, but is there any evidence the primary goal of the cartel was primarily intended to increase energy efficiency, or was it really pure unadulterated greed?
Honestly, were it for the sake of efficiency, I wouldn't mind it. Though the metric of lifetime in hours rather than lumen/watt makes my approval borderline rather than whole-hearted.
The first citation on the page[1] mentions researcher Markus Krajewski who reviewed Phoebus records and concluded "It was the explicit aim of the cartel to reduce the life span of the lamps in order to increase sales [...] Economics, not physics."
Cursory searches of Markus Krajewski yield an IEEE Spectrum article[2] with further references to his work:
> The 2010 documentary The Light Bulb Conspiracy explores the Phoebus cartel as an early example of planned obsolescence and includes interviews with Markus Krajewski. For more on the cartel and planned obsolescence, see the author’s "Fehler-Planungen. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der industriellen Obsoleszenz," in Technikgeschichte, vol. 81, No. 1, p. 91–114, 2014, and "Vom Krieg des Lichtes zur Geschichte von Glühlampenkartellen," in Das Glühbirnenbuch, edited by Peter Berz, Helmut Höge, and Krajewski (Braumüller Verlag, 2011).
This is truly a "The Sun"-tier comment. So many things are wrong. The EU did not mandate halogen bulbs, it phased out incandescent bulbs, with many exceptions for situations and use-cases where alternatives are inadequate. You can (and should) buy LEDs which are many times more efficient and cheaper (per hour of life) that incandescent bulbs. Finally, halogen bulbs are not only not "mandated" but actually in the processed of being phased out as well.
I never said the poster was a "deplorable", so you must be projecting. The reference to The Scum is due to the fact that British tabloids have a recurring trope of making up ludicrous facts about "totalitarian EU regulations". I hope I cleared up that misunderstanding.
LEDs still have PWM flicker and buzzing problems. This is unpleasant, inhibits focus, and makes them inadequate for me in all cases. Perhaps the fancy "smart bulbs" aren't as bad, but I don't have $125 for a single light bulb. I also don't want to fiddle around with my lighting and by multiple $125 bulbs until one works. I just want to put in a bulb and be done. The only lighting which has successfully done that for me has been incandescent or halogen.
> You must be getting the absolute worse brand of LED lamp to have PWM flicker or using a crap dimer
Related: is there any good source of reviews for LED bulbs that go into flicker (I seem to notice 120Hz flicker) and CRI? My local hardware store stocks a relatively paltry selection of bulbs (all built to cost), and I'm reluctant to experiment with the medium-size orders necessary to make shipping worthwhile.
If you see flicker, then you bought an LED lamp with a wrong kind of driver. You can dim LEDs to zero without any visible flicker if the circuit is designed properly
Could be, mine don't. And i consider myself sensitve to flickering. I just grabbed some from the hardware store while i was there and saw them on special offer. Some well known brand name. Guess i've been lucky.
The EU is its members. Every EU country voted to phase out incandescent bulbs, so that includes yours. This was not something imposed on your country against its will.
I had about 12 halogen recessed lights in my house. I replaced them with LED retrofit recessed lights and so far over three years none of them have failed. The LEDs are brighter and more power efficient. I think I paid for their cost over one year due to power savings and not even considering that I would be replacing one halogen bulb every month or two.
LED's also have an inferior light quality to incandescent. The color rendering index of the average LED is usualy 70-80, usually with horrible green spikes.
Incandescent lights are blackbody radiators and have a CRI of 100. So the quality of light and color rendering is equivalent to daylight.
Bums me out to hear that they're being phased-out in some places.
It's not hard to find CRI 95 led bulbs. I have a couple that are CRI 97. They really do look like incandescents (or at least, much much closer than typical leds). The only issue I've had is that you only seem to be able to get them up to around 800 lumens.
You just clearly explained how they are inferior in multiple ways, even if carefully researched and mitigated for. Most people just want what worked, to keep working as well as it did.
Getting used to not having what we had before is going to be the theme of this century, with environmental change. I have LEDs at home, no idea what spec, but honestly they are more than good enough. Prefer them to candles, or darkness.
They also consume considerably less energy, run cooler, and last longer. A single 100W lightbulb consumes more energy than running my entire computer. What we want hasn't got much to do with it. Continuing to use inefficient devices will result in a planet that no longer functions. Nobody wants that.
The incandescent light bulb ban is one of those things that can still get me fired up a decade later.
The idea that LEDs are now cheap, or cheaper seems like a tough argument. 4 packs of Phillips 40 or 60 watts used to be sold at the dollar store. $.25 cents per bulb. Or any hardware store had them for $1.19. Home depot currently has LED bulbs for 1.25 per bulb, 5x the price, IF you buy in bulk. 1.75 (7x the price) per bulb if you don't buy in bulk. If you aren't middle class or above $10 is a decent chunk of money. $10 is deciding between dinner or light, not both. The ban was indirectly a regressive tax that hurts the poor. Maybe if you spend money to buy in bulk then 2 years down the road you will be financially better off than if you bought incandescent bulbs. The poor don't have that option and the rich won't notice the pennies in savings.
The inefficiencies by heat loss doesn't make sense either unless you live in a very hot climate. Even in the PNW which is fairly mild, 9 months out of the year you the heat is on anyway. If the other 3 months are bright and sunny you probably don't have that many lights on.
I used to keep a light on in my well house to keep it just above freezing during winter. Had I not bought hundreds of incandescent light bulbs and stockpiled them I would have had to run a heater. The point here- a nation wide ban is overkill.
Conspiracy theory- I bet light bulb manufactures loved this ban, they probably even lobbied in support of it. Consumers have to pay 7x the price, sweet!
> 4 packs of Phillips 40 or 60 watts used to be sold at the dollar store. $.25 cents per bulb. Or any hardware store had them for $1.19. Home depot currently has LED bulbs for 1.25 per bulb, 5x the price, IF you buy in bulk. 1.75 (7x the price) per bulb if you don't buy in bulk.
Which is a nonsensical comparison, given that (good) LED lamps (which you can get at around that price) not only save a ton of energy, but also last a lot longer. Those 1.75 give you the same amount of light over their lifetime as 2.50 worth of incandescents you buy in bulk, so it's already cheaper even if you ignore the energy savings.
> Maybe if you spend money to buy in bulk then 2 years down the road you will be financially better off than if you bought incandescent bulbs.
Suppose you are a poor family. An incandescent light bulb fails. What do you do? Well, you move the bulb from your most-used lamp to the one where the bulb failed. Then, you buy a single LED bulb for 1.75 and put it in that most-used lamp. Assuming your typical household, your most-used lamp probably is a "60 W" lamp that gets at least 3 hours of use per day.
The replacement LED with the same light output uses about 8 W, possibly less. At 52 W less power consumption, that means that at (1.75 - 1) / .1 / (52 / 1000) = 144 hours of use, or about 48 days, they have already saved the 75 cents that they paid above the price for the four-pack of incandescents. Another 108 days later, they have saved another 1.75 in energy costs, so now they can buy the next LED without exceeding the total cost of 1 dollar.
So, yes, you have to be able to invest an additional 75 cents for less than two months in order to be able to switch over to LEDs. I am not saying that that can't be a problem for some, but you are sure way overblowing the scale of it.
In the long run, every single LED you buy saves you around 50 bucks total (replacement and energy costs), so once you have managed to come up with that 75 cent investment capital at the start it's about the best thing you can do if you are poor, and in no time you will be able to buy LEDs in bulk, too. Except, of course, that doesn't really make much sense because they last so long, so you are probably better of buying single bulbs when you need them, because they only get cheaper and more efficient. An incandescent bulb that you changed once a year you won't need to change for the next ten years if you switch to LEDs.
Wow, you used a lot math, I mostly made up my numbers and then made guesstimates based on those. :) $50 saving per bulb- holy shintos!
I concede, in most climates and most use-cases LEDs are a better buy. Most of my overhead lights are LED bulbs. I am not anti-LED or an LED-denier!
The whole thing just seems bizarre, even years later. Light bulbs are a small part of household electricity usage- water heater, heating/cooling, appliances, etc take more energy. Household electricity is a small part of all energy use- changes in industrial and transportation would have a bigger impact. While light bulbs represent a tiny fraction of overall power consumption they are probably the most visible and commonly used/purchased item. As a general rule it doesn't make sense to target areas that will cause the most disruption, to the most people to provide the smallest impact- if there has been any impact at all. Has anybody measured the impact? I tried to search for results of the ban but didn't really find anything meaningful. Has household electricity/ft2 usage dropped?
I would be curious if electricity usage did not drop at all. "oh it is an LED and is efficient so I will leave it on all day" I am sure there is a name for the effect/paradox. As far as I know impact wasn't measured. Is it another, "we did something, pat on the back" projects with no meaningful improvements?
... and that's with your cheap US electricity prices!
> Light bulbs are a small part of household electricity usage- water heater, heating/cooling, appliances, etc take more energy.
Well, that really depends on where you live, though. Here in Germany, heating mostly uses natural gas and oil, and AC is uncommon in homes, so lighting is a bigger percentage of electricity use. And potentially also of energy use, because heating with electricity is way less efficient than burning the fuel in your home in terms of primary energy use.
But also, you just have to take the efficiency gains that you can get, and that one was, overall, an easy one to get. If heating is 90% of your electricity use, but you have no way to make that more efficient, it's of no use that it's 90% of your electricity use. Lighting was overall easy to do, plus it didn't even cost anything, but rather saves everyone a not that insignificant amount of money now. Plus, for the migration to renewable energy, the efficiency of lighting is more important than the efficiency of other energy uses: You only need AC when the sun is shining and thus solar power is available, while you need lighting when the sun is down, and people generally want to be able to switch on light whenever they feel like it, while most bigger consumers of electric energy can deal relatively well with shifting their load profile: You can stop charging your car, or heating your house, or cooling your fridge, or washing your clothes for an hour of high demand/low availability without any impact on usability, but just shutting off all lights isn't really an option.
> changes in industrial and transportation would have a bigger impact
Well, maybe, but at what cost? It's trivial to have a "bigger impact" if you have infinite resources to spend. The interesting question is how much impact you can have per investment, and one that gives you a 50 bucks return on every dollar invested (or so) is pretty good based on that measure.
> As a general rule it doesn't make sense to target areas that will cause the most disruption
Except ... this didn't cause any disruption? You had good lighting options available all the way, the migration to LEDs was to be expected, and now everyone is saving money. Where is the disruption in that?
> I would be curious if electricity usage did not drop at all.
Chances are it didn't, but that's simply because people have more devices that use electricity now. I.e.: It would have risen if not for LEDs. But then, the switch to LEDs, while most visible, is not the only thing that's going on, the EU at least also has regulation on the efficiency and standby consumption of power supplies now, which also reduces energy consumption of new devices (or old ones, if you swap out the power supply).
> "oh it is an LED and is efficient so I will leave it on all day" I am sure there is a name for the effect/paradox.
I think "rebound effect" is the term, and I suspect there's probably some of that. But then, it's an about 8-fold increase in efficiency, so it's not that easy to use up again. I am pretty sure people don't use more than eight times the light now than before, and if they use twice as much, it's still clearly a win.
> As far as I know impact wasn't measured.
Well, it's probably difficult to do so, to any degree of accuracy, so possibly not. But it seems very unlikely that it was useless.
LED bulbs are much, much more expensive, don't live up to their advertised lifetime in my experience, cause problems when used with dimmers, produce more problematic waste...
Most importantly, the light is of vastly inferior quality. You will never match the beautiful spectrum of incandescent light with LED or fluorescent.
A few decades down the line we will be reflecting on how the LED cartel took us all to the cleaners
Seriously, they're not that expensive. I haven't changed a lightbulb in like 2 years, except for moving. Haven't even needed to buy any new ones since my city utility got some state subsidies (or something along those lines) and gives out bulbs multiple times a year.
Also would advocate for more strip lighting in homes. Looks better and saves a lot of space. My home office is all strip lighting.
They do loose some of the light over the years. I read it somewhere online, a guy tested the output after a few years and compared to new ones. Don't know correctly, but it was something like ~10-20% of loss in 2-3 years or something. I'm probably way off, but it was definitely not insignificant.
That's the exception though. You could probably still use incandescents for that purpose (I believe the EU regulations have exceptions for this kind of thing). Most people can use LEDs just fine.
Halogens burn out quickly, I think it's because they run too hot. I had a bunch of them in my previous apartment, and had to replace a bulb every few months or so. There were even dark marks on the ceiling from the heat.
No, they don't, they last about twice as long as normal incandescents.
> I had a bunch of them in my previous apartment, and had to replace a bulb every few months or so.
Which says nothing. How long did they last? And did you compare to normal incandescents in the same appartment? Some places have increased mains voltage that just causes bulbs to burn out faster. BTW a problem that you can avoid with high-quality LEDs.
> There were even dark marks on the ceiling from the heat.
Well, possibly there was, but the solution to that is CFL or LEDs, not normal incandescents, because those produce even more heat. Halogen are more efficient because they run the filament hotter, but therefore the amount of heat they give off is lower (lower wattage for the same amount of light, plus higher proportion of that is converted to light instead of heat).
The worst thing about the Phoebus Cartel is that for something that lasted just a few years (and didn't really work), it is constantly cited as the quintessential example of 'planned obsolescence' and therefore one of the evils of capitalism. 'Planned obsolescence' itself, is an overstated and overrated concept that is frequently conflated with common practices like making a product cheaper through the use of lower-quality materials.
"Planned obsolescence" and "value engineering" have almost the same effect for the customers though. Products are designed to just barely survive the EU's two year mandatory warranty period.
They may have similar effects, but their intent is very different, which means who gets blamed is very different. "Planned obsolescence" means evil, greedy corporations. "Value engineering" means consumers want "cheaper" not "better", which means we are the evil, greedy ones. But I'm not greedy, so it must be the corporations!
Intent is very hard to prove. In my last Sony laptop the keycaps were held in by hooks formed from a thin metal sheet. After a while (2.5 years in my case) the hooks start to break and the keys fell off. The keyboard was riveted and glued into the case which made it impossible to fix it. Was this the cheapest way for Sony to attach the keys to the laptop? Maybe. Did it get me to replace my otherwise perfectly fine laptop after 2.5 years? Certainly.
Maybe it's time to up that warranty period? Perhaps even different values for different kinds of products (3 years for a phone, 8 years for a washing machine, etc.).
>"Planned obsolescence" and "value engineering" have almost the same effect for the customers though.
No it doesn't.
We live in a world where if you want a quality drill, you can spend a few hundred bucks and get a quality drill that will last you a long time. You can also spend $20 for a cheap Black&Decker that will be good enough to do very minor things around the house. You're suggesting that we implement laws to make the latter illegal. Are you sure you want that? What if you don't want to pay for a quality drill, because the chepo-plastic one is more than enough for what you need, and you'd rather spend the money you save on something you value more than a drill.
Why not? "commercial reasons" for not supporting a device with updates is planned obsolescence. You (as a device manufacturer) plan to release a new model, so you try to make the old one obsolete.
Now given, the device might not stop working immediateley, or maybe never. The issue is that without updates your device might join a botnet.
There are ways around it. After you supported your device for the mini time that is 2 years (even if). Release ALL your sourcecode for that device.
They were crooks. The amount of cartels Philips has been in is staggering. They've been working to screw over their customers since the very beginning. Look it up, any infamous technology cartel from the 20th century you can find, big chance Philips was on it. When cartels went out of vogue they lobbied for regulation with pretty much the same effect - Philips will do anything, legal or not, to keep their margins up.
I really don't understand how easily people whitewash this shit.