LED bulbs create a substantial moral hazard for LED bulb manufacturers. It’s to their advantage to build them so that they contain fewer individual LEDs that are run harder, and will fail sooner.
They could build them to be more efficient, and last longer simply by including more individual LEDs in a given bulb, and they would get more light output for the same energy input and last longer, but it just isn’t in their interests to do so.
As the Dubai bulb shows, only government intervention to force them to build a longer lasting bulb will motivate them. Last I heard there are some indications that EU regulations will force manufacturers’ hand in Europe.
Meh people, forget that before China became the world‘s manufacturer, plenty of crappy products were made elsewhere. Now China makes everything – crappy and otherwise. The reality is they make everything to the price and to the standard that the market demands.
We’re getting rather off topic here but I’ll just say that on one hand, that’s quite true, and in today’s market it’s essentially impossible to avoid Chinese-made products, and some of them (like Apple products) are typically high quality. OTOH, though, since lowering manufacturing costs is the sole reason for moving manufacturing to China, it will pretty much universally be the choice of vendors competing on price over quality. So it’s probably fair to say that the spectrum of Chinese-made merchandise is biased on the side of low cost and low quality. Aggravating that is a pervasive lack of standards – e.g.- a history of contaminated food products, lead paint on children’s toys, etc.
Anecdotally, I’m relieved to have finally replaced the cheap Chinese-made tires I regrettably put on my car some years ago with good brand-name tires. The cheap ones had bad traction, were prone to slow leaks, and wore out prematurely. The brand name tires of US manufacturers are not necessarily made in the US (though more are made in the US than anywhere else) nor are Japanese or Korean tires necessarily made in those countries, but in a Consumer Reports article about the global tire industry, not a single one of the major tire brands makes any product in China – not a single one (that I could find). And then, also anecdotally, we have my persistently failing Chinese-made LEDs.