The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy
<i>>'There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes were reached.'</i><p>To go off on a tangent...<p>I have a couple of CFLs that have been going since 1997 in my first apartment while most of the CFLs I purchased after my last move in 2009 have burned out.<p>None of my LEDs have gone. Not the ridiculously expensive ones from a few years ago or the current "almost, but not quite cheap enough for the whole house" ones I've been testing out.<p>My impression is that there's a sweet spot in relatively early adoption for many technologies when you can get nearly all the eventual performance with much higher reliability. A point where manufacturers are perhaps over-engineering or at least have not yet dialed in their cost-cutting trade-offs.<p>Of course, whether this is worth anything depends on the context - my 2004 Linksys AP, 1997 bulbs and 1999 DVD player are fine for my purposes, but my tank-like 2009 Motorola Droid - not so much.