Is this a joke? $600+ for a desk LED lamp? Even if current LEDs lose brightness, you could just replace the bulb every month for the next 10 years before this lamp even came close to an ROI. But I guess Dyson isn't going after the "value" market, just the cool factor.

> Is this a joke?

I see you're new to Dyson's business model. Keep in mind, these are the guys who make a $400 fan in a niche full of $10 competitors.

And ignoring how it looks for a second, the Dyson Air Multiplier is kind of mediocre anyway (and VERY mediocre for the price point).

The rest of the electric fan market has shifted over the last ten-ish years to noise-efficiency. Meaning the most air movement for the least amount of noise. So we've seen new blade shapes, smarter motor designs, enclosures that attempt to dampen the noise, and so on. And Dyson's Air Multiplier could, in theory, have done well in that competition but they care more about form than function, so they stuck this tiny little motor with a higher RPM in the thing which has made it extremely loud for the amount of air that it can move.

In terms of noise-efficiency, it sounds as loud as fans from the 1990s and before.

Is there a good website that rates fans by power/noise/price? I don't actually care about the price much, I really want a quieter fan that won't make me turn up the music too loud to hear the details and wake anyone up.

Yeah, it's getting hard to find a fan that I can run at night to cover the noise of the city. Every time I buy a fan, it's quieter and quieter, but I like loud fans to help me sleep.

No sarcasm: Look into Nursery Sleep Soothers. While they sell white noise machines targeted at adults, they're all terrible because it is a niche market. But in the nursery sleep soothers category you can find a bunch of high quality white noise machines for a good price.

For example the Marpac Dohm has an actual spinning fan inside designed to generate white noise. But you can find digital noise simulators who can do: industrial sounds, water, fan noise, nature, and so on.

Is the Marpac Dohm actually targeted at nurseries? I've seen it quite frequently in medical waiting rooms. It helps provide privacy for those having sensitive conversations behind flimsy doors.

On Amazon at least they sell it under Baby Sleep Soothers and Sound Therapy Products.

I bought one for our baby's room, but when I decided I wanted one for myself, I hit on a much cheaper solution; I just turn my clock radio to an empty station and crank the volume.

Punch holes in the blades with a drill.

That and (perhaps) making the pattern asymmetric should restore the noise.

Apropos of nothing, Muji's USB desktop fan has contra-rotating blades and is amazingly quiet for the amount of air it can shift.

This is how engineers make money in an environment where most people do not understand how engineering works.

Dyson is just something of a rarity in that he's selling consumer devices to the public, rather than defense hardware to governments.

Everyone in on the "design" scam relies very heavily on the assumption that the more expensive goods work better than cheaper ones. As previously mentioned, there is no rational case to be made for buying one of these.

If my laptop computer lasted up to 37 years, I would likely still replace it after no more than 5, with another that cost half as much both in terms of initial investment and operating cost, while still offering greater capabilities.

I'd just take that $600 I might have spent on a lamp, buy Cree stock instead.

My mom once got a Dyson vacuum cleaner.

I can only assume Dyson pivoted from making a jet engine.

I bought a dyson. To test it, I vacuumed with my old unit, and then immediately vacuumed with my dyson. surprise, I managed to completely fill the canister.

they're noisy and expensive, but they work really well.

It's the only one where vacuuming becomes kind of fun because it actually works

Sounds just like Beats. Maybe Apple should buy them out and make gold lights for $6,000.

It looks kick-ass. That’s plenty. All the rest doesn’t matter. If you like the way this looks you gotta pay the price. (And what exactly is wrong with looking kick-ass?) I’m sure you will be able to buy some cheap imitation soon enough. If you are lucky this might even be picked up by some talented designer at Ikea and you might get a really honest and well-made imitation, not something that doesn’t even get the point of this design.

I also don’t think you ever bought an upscale lamp like this. $600 for a desk lamp is a completely middle of the road price for the category this lamp is competing in. It’s not even extraordinary. The competitors in this market segment have the same or higher prices.

For example, Elane from Serien costs roughly the same or even more and doesn’t even have any fancy heat pipes: http://serien.com/en/produkte/elane/table/

(I mean, look around the products of this brand and you will also find these technological innovations and unique materials and all that jazz that doesn’t amount to much in the end. It’s a justification game for the prices – but in the end it’s all about the looks, really. The drama of home furniture is that you can often get something decent but not very special for an ok price, but then … then you see this really cool looking thing right next to it that would add that little bit extra … but costs an order of magnitude more. I’m not sure why prices are so weird when it comes to that. I mean, someone like Ikea is sort of attacking that market and those prices in some weird way, but those upscale places still exist. And you definitely lose the uniqueness with Ikea – because their well-designed stuff will soon be everywhere.)

Plenty of designer stuff is vastly overpriced. That's fine, we all know that there is more than utility to making a purchase decision. But I do agree that the marketing here seems slightly off.

The LED cooling is the solution to a problem that nobody has or cares about if I ever saw one. And it doesn't even make for interesting small talk like some expensive gadgets. In terms of demographics, I think this lamp appeals more to the Wallpaper reading type than the Wired reading type and though there is a significant overlap, I think they should focus a bit less on the lifetime of the LED's and all that technical stuff.

I am the OP. Yes, that's the same reaction I had when I first noticed it. The funny thing is, they aren't even backing their "premium LED lighting" product the same way they did for vacs, which has 5-year limited warrant. LED lighting gets only Free 2 year limited warranty, even though they claimed "37 years" of lift span based on some calculation. One might wonder, will they still be around in business after 37 years?

The LEDs may well last that long. The electronics providing the correct voltage/current to the LEDs, not so much.

On the LEDs, the industry accepted method for measuring lumen maintenance of LEDs sets an "upper reporting bound" on LED life estimates at 6x the length of test data, since we aren't sure whether the prediction model will hold true over the longer term. Either you report L70 as the time when output drops below 70% of original, or you report it like "L70 > 60,000 hours" (if you had 10,000 hours of testing and it was predicted to stay above 70% at 60,000 hours).

Dyson is claiming 154000 hours, implying that they have over 25000 hours of test data. This is very light on supporting data, so I'm naturally skeptical of it. It's not uncommon to see people ignoring the 6x upper reporting bound because they want to publish a big number that may or may not actually mean anything. Dyson also don't mention whether they're talking about L70, L90, or some other criteria. L70 is typical, so I assume it's that.

I'd expect to see a INTMT test and their LM-79 lumen maintenance calculation, based on the temperature data and calculated in EnergyStar's freely available LM-79 spreadsheet. For high-end lighting products, this information gets published.

Well, the tall one will go well with an Eames chair [0]. Point being there is a niche market for practical lifestyle product which may go against conventional wisdom.

[0] http://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/lounge-seating/...

Or, if you want to match the harsh geometry of the lamp, a Rietvald Zig-Zag chair:

https://www.google.com/search?q=rietveld+zigzag+chair

Looking at what Flos and Artemide lamps go for, there's definitely a market at that price point. Whether it's worth it to you or me, well, probably not. But hey, you can cover a lifetime or three of petrol for the cost of a Tesla, and folks are forking over the cash left and right.

Stays bright for 37 years, has a 2 year warranty.

I think a true innovation would be a light that stayed bright for 2 years and had a 37 year warranty.

Heat pipes are used in laptop, desktop, GPU heatsinks and coolers. They are also commonly used in oil-pipes thru permafrost. Are they using some interesting long-life LEDs?

Probably. The heatpipes are either overkill, or these LEDs run very hot (combined 10W+ of heat). Wouldn't the metal frame of the lamp itself sufficiently cool 'normal' LEDs?

sufficiently cool may not be enough to get the stated life.

Like a processor running at 70C vs 35C, 70C is sufficiently cool (it's within spec say at 80C) but heat damage is continuous.

I was such a huge Dyson fan, bought a cleaner a decade ago, read his books.

Had the suspicion the cleaner was crap. Lots of reviews said the same. But I convinced myself I and the others were wrong, Dyson is a genius.

Some years ago I finally admitted it was expensive crap and got something else.

The cleaner isn't horrible, it just suffers from a very opinionated design. Price wise, he'd half to cut his prices to 2/3rds what they are to make them even remotely worth it.

OTOH, Miele makes the best damned vacuums available, and doesn't bother with that whirly vortex shit. Their canisters without the optional HEPA filter meet or beat the filtration power in the Dyson Animal models; with the HEPA filter, there isn't any other brand on the market that can come close.

Disclaimer: I have a Miele, it has lasted me over ten years, and has yet to give me problems, and is the best cleaning vacuum I've ever had.

I bought a Dyson vacuum 5 years ago or so for 1/2 price from a clearance sale. It has been one of the best vacuums I have owned. Was it worth the original $400 price? Probably not, but for $200 I think it was a good deal.

I paid almost double that ($700 US), and it is still definitely worth it. The product does much better than any other I've used, it's easy to clean, and it takes all manner of abuse. It's one of my favorite household tools by a long stretch.

> The product does much better than any other I've used, it's easy to clean, and it takes all manor of abuse.

Dyson! It takes on all manors. It'll take on yours. ;)

Dyson, like Bose, is a genius.

And Dyson, like Bose, is an extremely successful marketer.

Both companies have some very interesting engineering which is then translated into expensive consumer products that don't perform notably better than the competition, especially if you consider function (cleaning carpets, reproducing sound accurately) more important than features (no vacuum filter bag! Tiny speaker cubes!).

Of all the dyson products I have (2 vacs, 1 bladeless fan), customer service is the weakest link. The fan has a recall last year, they should have emailed customers shipping labels to print out to drop off the product at our convenience, but rather ask you to visit a local UPS B&M store and the store clerk had to fax the RMA request in. The whole thing took 2 hours on a busy Saturday. Completely failed customer service for a premium product that sells at 5x-10x the price of others. Yes the build quality is good, but not that good to worth 5x-10x the average price for the same product. And certainly not worth the hassles to deal with their customer support.

In the UK at least Customer Service is superb. I honestly cannot rate the company enough.

On the few occasions I've needed anything Dyson simply ask for the serial number and I describe the part. Next day or two and it arrives in the post.

They also do on site visits if the vacuum has any issues. £80 labour and parts inclusive.

I mean my mum still uses her DC02 from 1995 and it works just fine.

They're (in the UK at least) a top, top company.

I've got a Dyson DC18 and it's been good as far as I can tell, but I haven't compared it with anything else. What did you replace it with? Is the replacement better? Did you try any side-by-side comparisons?

1. I've replaced it with a Miele and a Siemens (needed two) 2. The both clean better, I find less dirt in carpets and e.g. in corners than with the Dyson. 3. Personal subjective opinion: Having a bag is cleaner for me.

Huh. I have a Dyson vacuum; it works really well vs the other vacuums I've had. Might be a case of "have not bought decent vacuums before", but it does work.

Have you seen their other lighting product? That's some serious heat-sinking!

http://www.dyson.com/lighting/ariel.aspx

They don't even tell you how bright their expensive lights are. they give some value in lux but that depends on the distance in which it is measured. I want lumen values!

At what point does a product last "too long"? It seems that designing an expensive lamp and marketing the fact that it lasts 37 years seems kinda...dumb.

First there is the issue at the business level. Returning customers are the easiest and cheapest sells...but if your customer only buys a product every 30+ years...not great for business.

Then there is the technology. Why make something last that long with current technology when in 10 years or less, something more efficient and "better" will come along.

I'm not sure many people can even keep track of a lamp over that long. Between moving, things breaking, etc.

>First there is the issue at the business level. Returning customers are the easiest and cheapest sells...but if your customer only buys a product every 30+ years...not great for business.

This exact line of thinking has created scads of products that suffer from the opposite problem -- products that are kind of cheap and need to be repurchased every couple years, overall costing several times more than a good product would and generating several times more garbage.

> At what point does a product last "too long"? It seems that designing an expensive lamp and marketing the fact that it lasts 37 years seems kinda...dumb.

Well it is somewhat dumb because nobody believes it will last 37 years, partly because of the "everything is junk these days" effect that we've come to expect, but also because it comes with a two year warranty.

Well, one point is purely as a marketing tool. I doubt very few of these lamps will ever last 30+ years, due to moving, accidents etc, and probably dyson doesnt either. however its effective to say that in marketing.

Outside of that, people expect certain pieces of hardware to just 'work' forever. Generally they don't expect a lamp to ever 'require' an upgrade. Yes it will probably be replaced for some reason in that timespan, but not generally due to 'failure'

The LEDs last 37 years (well, 154,000 hours). I have a feeling that, for example, the capacitors in the power supply won't last that long. I also notice that they only provide a 2 year limited warranty. (LED lamp lifespan tends to be limited by other components failing in general, unless you get dodgy LEDs or do something really screwy with the cooling.)

I have a Koncept Z-bar desk lamp (~$300) that I got at my lighting shop after looking for something that was cool to the touch and had a nice even light pattern. One minute I use it on "low" for lighting up my desk and the next I'm using it at full brightness for computer vision tasks.

I suspect that you have to be old enough that your eyes need a little help before you can appreciate a good lamp.

I thought heat pipes needed convection to work. How would the liquid move in a straight, level pipe?

The liquid in a heat pipe can return to the hot end through capillary action, and I believe this is how heat pipes in computer equipment work. They can work in any orientation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe

I agree that this is most likely to be a capillary-pumped heat pipe. For more reading about how the wicks work:

http://www.thermalfluidscentral.org/encyclopedia/index.php/C...

The return mechanism is via capillary action; surprisingly, heat pipes work in any orientation, even freefall.

Very high g-forces can prevent them working, though.

I think it's just a metal heat sink, no liquid?

There are a number of different ways to build heat pipes. A few of the common designs typically used in cpu heatsinks and laptops do not rely on gravity or centrifugal force. Based on the skimpy page content, it appears they are using the more common wick/capillary system here. I'm not seeing anything ground breaking in their blurb, but maybe they left out the fancy part.

There's no liquid involved. They use a copper part, similar to the heat sinks on CPUs.

You are wrong. Look at all the other responses. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe

I'm really surprised that there are no technical specifications that would include, say, colour temperature. I've yet to see an LED bulb that produces light anywhere close to the warmth and spectrum spread as a halogen bulb. At $649, I'd definitely need to see that in person.

I'd also be in favour of a 37 year payment plan at $17.54/year.

LED bulbs have been getting gradually closer to the color fidelity of incandescents, I would think for most people in most situations, those with a CRI greater than 90 would be sufficient (certainly worth it for the the efficiency gain), e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_CRI_LED_lighting

Isn't it a bit too much for an LED light?

You're paying a premium for the industrial design.

You're paying for the name. This has all the industrial design as the vesa mounts I have for my monitors and they cost $25.

Is it just me, or does this completely fail to mention the amount of lumens it produces, the wattage of the lamp, or the incandescent-equivalent rating? Basically, all the fundamental parameters you'd normally expect when buying a lamp aren't there.

"Eight LEDs provide 587lx of warm, white light for 37 years"

But that's the only reference on the page.

Yeah, which is pretty meaningless because lux is a measure of light intensity at one particular spot and it doesn't provide any information about the distance at which that's measured, how big an area it'll reach that lux value over, or anything. My little 1 watt torch could probably produce ridiculous amounts of lux so long as it was only over an area the size of a postage stamp, for example.

It looks perfect for a cleanroom but in my office those little wheels would be covered in dust immediately.

There’s also an “Ariel” lamp that doesn’t appear to have any moving parts, but I imagine those fins would be a disaster… http://www.dyson.com/lighting/ariel.aspx

Yeah, right. Like a normal person will pay that much for a lamp.

What suggested to you that the target audience was “normal persons”?