no hot filaments...
There may not be filaments, but heat is still an issue for LEDs.
Some bulb manufacturers basically overdrive cheaper diodes to get extra brightness at the cost of generating extra heat. Some of those manufacturers compensate for the heat in some way, others don't even bother and produce bulbs with a service life of months instead of decades. Some of these are fly-by-night online sellers that won't exist anymore by the time their products start to fail. Others are established brands that people will blindly purchase based on a reputation that no longer matches reality. There are some reliable brands out there if you read up on it, but why the fuck should we have to research every little inane item in our life?
Aside from corporate greed, though, there are other reasons heat causes early LED bulb failure. Two common ones are incompatible devices on the same circuit (like light dimmers), and installing the bulb in an enclosure without adequate heat dissipation (like a ceiling 'boob' light).
I've been all LED for well over a decade, and have had a good experience so far. I personally tend to buy smart bulbs that can put out way more light than I need, and run them at 20-50% brightness most of the time. Feit Electric and Govee's basic smart bulbs have been pretty reliable for me, but I admit I'm a pretty small sample size. I know I'm paying a premium for that approach, but it's not unreasonable and I do prefer not having to worry about it.
LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.
It's 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments...
I understand that it's probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.
But it's still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.
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