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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised GE stuck around in a commodity business for so long. Lighting is something we'll always need but the prices are so low these days that I wonder what their margins are.

Also, not sure what's next after LEDs.

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Considering how far the pricing has fallen on good LED lighting it would take a significant breakthrough to displace them. I was able to replace nearly all the lighting in my house late last year and earlier this year.

LED lighting today is leaps and bounds better than just a few years ago and magnitudes cheaper. I have found replacements for all bulb types I have use of.

I have fluorescent tubes in the garage. There are plenty of LED replacement tubes, but all of them emit a lot less lumens. I'm faced with having a dimly lit garage or adding more light circuits.

Since I work in the garage, having it dimly lit is a problem. Also, I have the age problem of my eyes losing the ability to change their focal length. Bright lighting alleviates much of this.

While most LED fixtures in that form factor do underperform on lumans foot-for-foot by a margin of around 30%, integral LED shop light fixtures usually have about 30% lower power consumption as well and are usually chainable internally (e.g. you can run wiring between fixtures through the metal channel of the fixtures, similar to what's done with the fluorescent). So unless you're hitting a space limit you can likely install 30% more integral LED fixtures without too much trouble. Since LED retrofit pretty much requires changing the ballast anyway you aren't really looking at that much more expense going to integral fixtures.

Adding more light fixtures might actually prove to be a very good thing: always having a light source that is (almost) exactly above you is really nice. The more light sources you have, the fewer shadows you'll have to contend with. This was a real revelation when I accidentally discovered it a few years ago.

I did pretty much the same with the Ikea LED lights, which aren't too pricey.

Given the following video on GE Lighting’s YouTube account, I would imagine that what’s next after (smart) LEDs is a better company that cares about the end user producing a better product at a fraction of the price: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo

wow, what a nightmare to reset...

I'm still not convinced that this isn't a prank video and the entire GE Lighting channel isn't a parody, based on this video alone.

It sounded like they reused the same 10 seconds of video half a dozen times.

That video was even better before they deleted the comments. Those were great. I saved a few choice ones:

Resetting a lightbulb. What a time to be alive.

Next time I feel like I hate my job, I'm going to think about the poor actor who had to narrate this horrorshow just to put food on the table.

That's the funniest thing I've seen in a while. 10/10 would reset again.

1960s: In 50 years we will have flying cars and holidays on the moon 2019: How to factory reset your light bulbs

This is the funniest video I've seen in weeks! You have created the ultimate 21st century light bulb joke

this isn't the cyberpunk future I wanted

This shit is hilarious!.. Could you imagine if this was real?

As an engineer, you know it's time to pick a new career when the video documentation of your product winds up on CNN...

If it really were a smart bulb it would beg for death.

> Also, not sure what's next after LEDs.

The latest and greatest LED lighting still looks awful to me - it seems fuzzy and unpleasant even though it appears yellowish rather than the harsh blue or weird glowing violet of earlier LED bulbs.

The spectrum from an incandescent bulb seems so much better.

I greatly prefer the low power, low heat, and long life of LED bulbs, but I just can't get past the awful light that comes from them.

I wish it would become more common to put a lot of different spectrum LEDs on a bulb (really on the PCB that has the LEDs since the 'bulb' is just a diffuser).

Totally agree. I'm not a fan of the residential LED light bulbs that I have. Even though they are supposed to be 3200ºK there's weird color fringing at the penumbra and they cause a lot of metamerism on certain materials. And these bulbs were around $20/ea.

Clothes' colors look quite different from the original under (what I think is) an LED light at night. That's clothes on a clothesline in a corridor outside my house.

Look into High CRI bulbs (incandescents have CRI 100, anything from CRI 95 upwards is pretty good). They exist, they're just a bit niche still, so you have to be looking for them

As others point out, just pay attention to specs. Anything with a CRI of 95 or higher will be virtually impossible to differentiate from incandescent.

Better quality LEDs I expect. High CRI (>95) bulbs have much higher light quality than your average LED , and they haven't made their way into the mainstream yet.

Though they're not mainstream, seems like they're pretty affordable these days. Thanks for the info.

Not > 95 CRI, but seems like 95 CRI Philips bulbs ($11).

https://www.prolampsales.com/products/philips-470159-78mr16-...

Some highish CRI (90-93) bulbs are a few bucks ($1-$7)

https://www.1000bulbs.com/category/led-a19-lights-high-cri/

Ushio ColourMax, 96 CRI ($9.97)

https://www.lampline.com/ushio-colourmax-led-par16-sp15-ww30...

Most of Consumer Lighting had already been sold off. They were working on services like lightgrid management for cities. But even 30 years ago, Lighting was one of the smallest parts of GE.

Good point.

Philips Lighting is a competitor, and they have a similar portfolio of non-consumer lighting solutions, like UV-C lighting, lighting-as-a-service (financial product), city/building/warehouse/airport lighting, etc.

https://www.lighting.philips.com/main/home

I was about to say there's also specialized lighting niches where margins might be higher, like airfield lighting (GE Aviation lighting). Maybe the installation contract costs are where they make their money, because their consumables are not that expensive (<$100).

https://airportlighting.com/airport-lighting-manufacturer-br...

An elevated runway light costs $17.76.

Philips Lighting is interesting, since they're a spin-off of a merger of a sell-off of Westinghouse Electric.

Both GE & Westinghouse were huge conglomerates (Westinghouse began its sell-off decades earlier than GE), so is this the market deciding that these companies were too big to be successful?

I thought Philips Lighting didn’t exist as a company name anymore, but that lighting.philips.com URL seems to indicate otherwise.

Googling taught me it was spun off from Philips and later renamed to Signify, with “Philips” one of the Signify brands (https://www.signify.com/global/brands). That Signify page links to a philips.com URL, so it seems the two companies are intertwined, the brand name was licensed, or whatever.

I don’t think they were too successful. It’s more that former giants in electronics can’t/don’t want to compete in low-margin markets, and focus on higher-margin ones. Philips itself went even further, and spun off commercial lighting, focusing on health, where it thinks it can get even higher margins than in commercial lighting.

Cloud-based lighting? All you need is a hole in your roof. I can't figure out a pricing structure, though.

Free for 8 hours/day, then you have to pay.

Fiber to the home.

pfft. whoever heard of sending light over a fiber?

Time to reify your lightbulbs with serverless cloud smart lights using AI and the Deepest Machine Learning Neural Networks so you can finally stop buying $1 lights at the dollar store. We'll call them green lights (but not because they are good for the environment).

I fail to see why innovation in the lighting space is not a worthy endeavor for GE. By analogy, personal computers are a commodity business but Apple hasn't abandoned the Mac (yet).

What leads you to believe that GE was ever innovating in the lighting space?

...after Edison, I mean.

AFAIK GE’s lighting business, from the start, has just been riding on the fact that (incandescent, halogen, and even fluorescent) lightbulbs were both fragile and required nasty chemicals to make, and so a large company like GE can get better economies of scale on production than their smaller competitors—by either having large contracts with channel partners, or by just vertically integrating all the way down to mining and all the way up to distribution logistics.

Apple has figured out a way to de-commodify their computer business. Mac OS is a value add that nobody else has. Light bulbs are light bulbs.

I'm looking into this but maybe can't be efficient.

https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/en/about/rd/research/high...

My company was renovating their headquarters in New York and I am pretty sure the entire building was to be equipped with LED by GE.

I bet lightning is good business (for big buildings) and definitely a core thing to provide as part of electricity (re)installations.

Nice thing about LED is that it can be a drop-in replacement for 277VAC fixtures common in US commercial/industrial settings.

Though there are warehouses full of 277 fluorescent fixtures and ballasts that nobody wants.

Wireless Sensors in Lightbulbs to empower smart building applications.

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