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.
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.
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.
That and (perhaps) making the pattern asymmetric should restore the noise.
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.
I can only assume Dyson pivoted from making a jet engine.
they're noisy and expensive, but they work really well.
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.)
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.
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.
[0] http://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/lounge-seating/...