This has some very appealing aspects—I'm particularly intrigued by the stand design—but I'm mystified by the idea that a lamp designed to last six decades apparently requires an app to operate many of it's key features. Sixty years ago there was, as far as I can tell, one significant digital network in the world[0], and the smallest computers weren't desktops--they were desks.[1] It seems all but impossible that Dyson's app is still going to be available and functional for more than maybe a decade of this lamp's projected lifespan. Computer technology just evolves too fast. I would really appreciate if $600+ appliances would include in the box everything that they need to operate to the best of their capabilities, so that we don't end up with lamps stuck in alarm clock mode when Dyson doesn't upgrade their app to work with iOS 16.
I have an app for a product I helped build at a startup that launched and went under back in 2014.
The app which now displays the "This app needs to be updated by the developer to work on this version of iOS" message.
That ain't gonna happen. (Not even sure if anybody still has the keys to that Apple Developer account or not. The end of that startup was not very pretty...)
Fortunately, this device exposes all its functionality via a local web server - the app was mostly a neat way of finding the device's local IP address then opening up a web view for that. So at least it still works and can be configured - you just need to know how to find it's IP address via other means...
Devices that require apps to use are infuriating. I recently got a bose soundbar and subwoofer and the instructions tell you to install the app so you can connect the subwoofer to the soundbar. I don't have any devices that can run the bose app...
I eventually found out if you use an AUX cable (not included) you can connect the two devices together without an app.
It is infuriating. Read the terms and conditions/privacy policy for the apps!
For a soundbar, that sits in my living room to produce sound from a television, maybe stream music to it via Bluetooth or listen to online radio why does it need to send analytical data home! I run my own local DNS server with blocklists with one domain being metrics.bose.com. No way am I buying the newer models with built-in microphones.
Likewise, I have the soundtouch on it's own IoT of crap VLAN which has very restrictive firewall rules. I had to jump through several hoops to get this to work so I can control it from my phone which is on a trusted VLAN. This should be straight forward enough using avahi mDNS reflector and igmpproxy however Bose says the Soundtouch does not support cross VLAN https://community.bose.com/t5/SoundTouch-Archive/SoundTouch-.... That's not completely true, by default it does support it as it is just standard networking with unroutable requests being past to the default gateway however Bose have gone out of there way and done extra work to explicitly block traffic from a different subnet the soundbar is on, probably as a cheap way of securing the device for people who leave their internet routers wide open. The proper solution would have been for Bose to provide some authentication mechanism between the app and soundbar. Luckily it's easy to work around with NAT / IP masquerading.
Even with this, I've had the app switch the soundbar from it's IoT wifi SSID to the trusted wifi SSID on one occasion. I'm not sure how or why but I'll be monitoring it.
I'm going to actively avoid IoT devices now on, the general implementation seems to be substandard, end-of-life will generally be the end of app updates instead of the device physically breaking. Sonos have already done this by essentially changing the terms and conditions for users with existing devices and users not agreeing have their devices essentially become bricks https://www.zdnet.com/article/sonos-accept-new-privacy-polic....
Keep in mind that many (all?) smartphones are deliberately obsoleted within 2-3 years of release - as an example, my S5 (released 2014) only supports through Marshmallow (obsolete as of 2016). Any apps requiring Nougat or later are unavailable to me. Given that I personally use my phone for communication, browsing the web, reading, and note-taking (and occasionally SSH), this isn't a concern, but it might well be a deal-breaker for a Bose soundsystem, unless their apps happen to be backwards-compatible (though being IoT-connected would be enough to make me avoid it like the plague regardless).
Same situation here, but with an S6. I would probably pay a subscription for an AOSP based install that was supported and got updates. The volunteer level of support for supporting different devices that LineageOS gets means that for some phones (namely the one I'm using), have poor or nonexistent current offerings. :/
I run Linux on my computers and degoogled android on my phone. Do I not deserve to have speakers because I don't run google spyware? Why should speakers even need an app, I just want to plug them in and have sound.
$500 for a lamp... I'm out of words.
I don't care how much tech you put into it, at the end of the day, it's not going to be tremendously better than a lightbulb
hanging over your desk for $5~10.
Whereas an Anglepoise lamp actually will last 60 years. Many already have. It's too early to know if their LED variant will.
Dyson had one decent idea that everyone else adopted too - cyclones instead of bags. Everything else seems to require paying 10x what a sane premium and expensive cost might be - lamps, hair dryers, fan heaters.
The innovation is making it appear complex enough to justify the absurd price. I bet they are still using too much ABS plastic that'll be disintegrating after 5 years.
I got my wife the hair dryer and I'm genuinely impressed with it. It weighs nothing, uses proper PID control for heat and fan, heats up and cools fast and just feels good. The device stays cool while heating the air and it blows a lot of air while making hardly any noise.
In short, I can't imagine a more perfect hair dryer.
Sadly, I am bald and do not get to use it. I did spend a while gushing about how neat it was, though.
The LED component probably will last 60 years (8 hours a day). My guess is they are using Nichia LEDs, which tend to have an L70 (lifetime at which the brightness stays above 70% of the original output) of 150,000 to 300,000 hours. If you run them cool enough and at the right current/voltage, the LED itself will actually last that long.
However, the LED is probably the most reliable part of the whole lamp. You might see a few units last that long, but most of the other electronics will have failed by then. And even if they have not failed, both the LEDs and controls will be seriously out of date by then.
If you look at the market Dyson is in (very high-end lighting), $600 to $900 is in the same order of magnitude on price. Brands like Artemide, Marset, Flos, Roll & Hill, and Anglepoise all command prices most people would think are ridiculous. With Dyson, you get a lot more functionality than those other brands, but I would consider this purchase more like a luxury car (service life of maybe 20 years, original owner has it for 3-10 years) than a high-end watch (could last many decades with consistent service).
I've seen the previous task lamp from Dyson in person, and it does use a lot of metal (minimal ABS). But that doesn't change the argument around electronics. I feel like Dyson really didn't have to make the ridiculous 60 year claim. Enough people in the target market would still buy it.
Their contra-rotating drum washing machine was innovative but they pulled it from the market. Innovative ideas don’t necessarily having staying-power either.
True, I'd forgotten that one. The same explosion in a paint factory ABS everywhere looks as the vacuums meant it wasn't a permitted option for our house. :)
They updated those that were sold to disable the contra-rotating. No idea why.
lol no. Anglepoise were just about top of the market when we bought one about ten years ago. Paid about £90-£100. A quick search shows about 10% more now. A genuine antique can run higher, especially if with Tiffany shades, original 20s bankers lamps etc.
I'm sure there's one or two others selling emperor's new clothes at absurd prices like Dyson too -- that's very far from "often".
Yet they only provide a 5 year warranty. I would expect a $600 desk lamp to have at a lifetime warranty.
And they couldn’t even be bothered to get the warranty details right: at the top of the page, it says parts and labor, but at the bottom it says parts only.
My coffee maker is from 1972 which makes it more than a decade older than the user. So there seems to be a market for high quality, unbreakable technology.
But then again, how many years could it be operational when depending on an app.
> So there seems to be a market for high quality, unbreakable technology.
There's a whole subreddit devoted to it, /r/buyitforlife.[1] I guess that's not much of a claim, since there's a subreddit for everything, but this one is kinda neat. :)
That said, I think what a lot of people take issue with on Dyson devices is the extreme price premium which isn't really required most the time to achieve the advertised level of quality.
I once had a really good 40-year-old washing machine at a place I rented. Later, when I needed a washing machine of my own I looked up that top-quality brand and discovered in the intervening time they'd been brought by one of the bottom-quality brands, replaced their entire product lineup, moved their manufacturing abroad, and most likely replaced every employee too.
God these products are terrible. All that added cost to protect some budget LEDs from burnout or discolour. They cost next to nothing. There is no innovation in this product.
> Heat Pipe cooling technology. […] Dyson engineers addressed this with technology often used in satellites.
Or in many/most CPU and GPU heatsinks for the last decade or so, both Intel and AMD have heatpipe-based stock coolers in their range. There are heatpipe-based heatsinks available for $10~15.
Can't edit anymore, but just thought a bit more about it: more or less every laptop with a fan would also be using heatpipes, especially with the "quest for thin-ness" few modern laptops can afford to put a fan and a radiator on top of a CPU, so it's always heatpipes from the chips to a radiator in some sort of motherboard indent.
Kinda? It already exists, but usually to better spread heat to the sink in high-power LED lamps (50W+, not equivalent, actual).
And my point is outlining that it's "satellite technology" is complete bullshit marketing copy.
I would expect more or less every laptop with fans[0] to use heatpipes, even for gaming / workstation laptops it hasn't made sense to stick a radiator on the CPU/GPU in a long time.
[0] apparently fanless devices don't, I guess there wouldn't be enough of a heat differential between the CPU and a hypothetical heatspreader for it to work?
> And my point is outlining that it's "satellite technology" is complete bullshit marketing copy.
Actually, I have a friend who works at a company which designs extreme heat pipes and heat wicks for satellite applications.
He has a satellite-spec heat pipe specimen which he shows around with heat-sensitive paint to demonstrate heat transfer speed, and it's way faster than conventional heat pipes. It's almost instant. Don't know the secret sauce though.
Yeah, this also jumped at me. I think that when copy writters make that kind of claim it really hurts the credibility of the entire copy, and you start to wonder where else they're exaggerating.
This is crazy expensive for a desk lamp, but I can imagine applications that would justify expensive lighting. I’d happily pay 10-20x premium for guaranteed ultra-long life bulbs to use in built-in home fixtures—especially difficult-to-reach locations.
A couple fo years ago someone figured out how to recreate sunlight. I can't wait for that to take off and was hoping this might be the start. I think this is them https://www.coelux.com
Personally, I'm done with Dyson. James was a vocal supporter of Brexit, gets what he wants, then decides to move his company's HQ to Singapore. That kind of blatant hypocrisy taints their products for me.
Not sure about the point of this. Okay, the heat pipe is a reasonable idea, but a light that matches my local sun cycle would be useless: At night (when I actually need it) it would be off.
> but a light that matches my local sun cycle would be useless: At night (when I actually need it) it would be off.
The daylight cycle matching (and the manual tuning) varies color temp between 2700K and 6500K; it doesn't (at least, in any of the description) vary light level. It's basically the same concept (but more localized) as f.lux for desktop screens.
That might be OK for casual use but is a non-starter for anyone who deals with colours, photos or documents.
The entire 'warm white' concept is based around the colour temperature of candles, those being traditionally associated with night illumination. But look at the actual colour temp of an overcast sky just after Sunset; it's 5000K+ blue-grey, not 2500K yellow. The latter has no place in nature other than fire. Yet somehow our ancestors managed to go to sleep...
> That might be OK for casual use but is a non-starter for anyone who deals with colours, photos or documents.
I think you just mean colors, but tried to find three different ways to say it (and kind of failed, because lots of people “deal with” document all the time and aren't concerned with color.)
At any rate, the light came be fixed at any supported point, too, the matching is just an available function, not something you are locked into. So for uses for which it doesn't meet your needs, you would just not use it.
> But look at the actual colour temp of an overcast sky
Not sure about handling the overcast part, but that's explicitly what this does otherwise.
> The latter has no place in nature other than fire. Yet somehow our ancestors managed to go to sleep...
Not sure what your point is, since the color of natural light just after sunset is only relevant here if you think humans are optimized for sleep at twilight. Which...they aren't.
...water cooling process works by condensation. As the processor heats up, the liquid essentially vaporizes, keeping the CPU cool. The vapor then travels to the opposite end of the of the heat pipe, where it condenses back into liquid when cooled off.
I have a Shuttle PC from 2003 with heat pipe cooling. For about 10 years, they made machines with a heat pipe system to transfer heat from the CPU chip surface to a finned plate at the back of the box behind the fan, allowing a more compact package.
But for an LED? Come on.
The cutting edge technology in LED lighting is to use power supplies that don't need electrolytic capacitors. The capacitor usually fails long before the LED.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...
[1]: eg https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mainframe-compute...