Why does every small appliance or useful home electronics item have the BRIGHTEST LEDs in them?

I bought a new fan for our bedroom Sunday. It has 4 speed settings, and LEDs to display which setting you’re on.

Just like every other electrical device in our bedroom, I had to cover the LEDs with electrical tape because they are TOO DAMM BRIGHT. That one light was more than bright enough for me to see in the room with all the lights off.

I can’t sleep well if there’s a lot of light like that, especially blue light, and it’s like every fucking electronics manufacturer used the same extra bright blue LEDs.

All of our power strips have them. Same brightness.

The fans have them.

Don’t even get me started on digital clocks and the plague of bright LEDs that they bring about

Many charging plugs have them built into the plug itself.

Even some fucking light switches have them now!

I have about 6 different things in our bedroom that have electrical tape over their completely unnecessary LEDs.

Why has this become such a common thing? Is this really something most people want? To have a room that is never actually dark even with the lights turned off?

  • LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Thought this was going to be a more specific complaint about computer hardware/accessories. So much of the high end stuff is just littered with bullshit RGB lighting. Coolers, GPUs, keyboards, mice, monitors, case fans, even fucking RAM sticks! It’s insane.

    For general appliances my complaint wouldn’t be the single LED on it but the brightness. Like you I cover up the bright ones with electrical tape. It wouldn’t even cost them any extra money to make it lighter. Just requires a different resistor value.

    • Jon Von Basslake@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      For some fucking reason we went from a nice minimalistic design in pcs to all the colors of the rainbow and then some. Like, who cares what it looks like, what matters is the performance it gets…

    • Khan@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      At least most of that can be turned off in settings somewhere.

      Bought a neat closed-loop watercooling cpu heatsink that has a whole dang programmable screen on it if I pay a monthly thing, or solid colors if I don’t. defaults to cycling through the rainbow. But it has an off mode, so I’m A-OK with none of that.

      • LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah you can usually turn it off, but it’s still annoying.

        I bought a mechanical keyboard that I otherwise really like. But it came with full RGB on it. I can disable the rainbow pattern it does by default with the software, but the manufacturer cheaped out and didn’t include onboard memory for settings. I didn’t realize this would ever be an issue so I didn’t look for it when buying… The end result is that every time my computer turns on, my keyboard looks like it’s trying to summon a leprechaun, and that only stops once Windows has loaded the software up in the background.

        • Khan@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          It’s a problem, but a pretty funny one, to me. Mine does the same thing, startup is full rainbow, then it settles.

    • Landrin201@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      I don’t mind it in a computer because the rbg makes the ram go faster 😂

      But in all seriousness it bothers me less in computers because they are only on when the machine is on, so turning it off fixes the problem. Those are deliberately there to make an asthetic, so I understand it.

      But the indicator lights on power strips and shit like that don’t do anything

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      There’s an even cheaper solution for manufacturers that’s practically free, just put a more opaque plastic over it.