Greetings,
In 2014, I bought some Cree LED bulbs, some of the first mainstream varieties available. Not cheap - I think they were at least $10-15/bulb, at the time. I still have one circa-2014 100W equivalent Cree I use every day in my desk lamp. Anecdotally at least, they seem reliable.
The construction of the early bulbs tended to be quite exotic - Fancy cast aluminum pieces, fancy connectors, and so on. Obviously, it was a technology in its infancy.
From an electronics perspective, these bulbs had (relatively) complex driver boards with some sort of switch-mode driver. Board was usually crammed with big inductor, one or more electrolytic caps, an MOV, fusing, EMI filter, switching MOSFET -- All the normal stuff you'd see an a power supply connected to mains.
Fast forwarding a few years, the market has reached equilibrium, seemingly at the absolute lowest cost implementation possible. These days, seems most bulbs have some simple capacitive dropper or some all-in-one current regulator IC.
How did we get here? Why is it "acceptable" or "reasonable" now to go for these super cheap implementations but 6-7 years ago we needed to cram a full-blown AC-DC power supply in the base of a bulb? Have the LED chips improved? COB style LEDs?
In my experience, the newer bulbs have poor reliability, but I can't tell if that's a result of their overall design topology or if they are just built like crap. Or both.
Anyone able to summarize what happened over the last few years?
Thanks.