No Stupid Questions

Yeah the drivers are shit on cheap products and heat can wear them out easily. I find that LED bulbs "burn out" by just being super dim rather than physically snapping like incandescent filaments. I have these 96 cent cheapass LED bulbs that I have no expectation of lasting long, and I have other 6 dollar dimmable bulbs that I hope I will last longer.

My experience has been that they last for more years than I tend to notice which ones are which. I'm not mad at all about their longevity.

I had 2 LED bulbs that I know for sure that I bought prior to 2015 that only recently failed. Those bulbs lasted at least 9-10 years. The rest of my bulbs I haven't kept up with but those 2 older ones looked very distinctive with aluminum heatsink material for their bottom halves.

I have a dozen that run 12+ hours a day. I've had 1 fail in 5 years.

Don't buy cheap LEDs, and don't put them in enclosures that trap heat.

Typically it's not the emitters -- the LED's themselves -- that fail. If driven correctly, those have lifetimes of tens of thousands of hours. That's what the manufacturer is advertising on the box. Yes, an individual LED when driven correctly will probably last 20,000 hours. (Usually more, depending on how pedantic you want to get. The 20,000 hour figure often quoted is the point where the emitter drops to 80% of its original light output.)

LED "bulbs," the type that replace filament bulbs in consumer fixtures, typically fail in their driver hardware. LED's run off of low voltage DC and in the base of all of those LED conversion bulbs is a power conversion assembly that steps down and rectifies 120v/240c AC to whatever DC voltage the LED array in there expects. These are inevitably made out of whatever the cheapest passives and semiconductor components the manufacturer thinks they can get away with. These don't last 20,000 hours, especially not in where they're usually installed.

The main killer for all semiconductor electronics, which includes both LED's themselves and their driver circuitry, is heat. This is often exacerbated by the fact that LED replacement modules are usually stuck in enclosed light fixtures designed for filament bulbs that have insufficient ventilation to get rid of the waste heat from the components in an LED module. The insides of those enclosed ceiling light fixtures, the ubiquitous "boob light," gets hot, even with only LED modules installed. Filament bulbs don't care because they don't have any electronics in them and how they work is literally by getting so hot the glow. But LED modules in that kind of environment will invariably suffer an early failure.

The best way you can get your LED modules to last longer is to install them in a fixture where they'll have a lot of air circulation available or at the very least which is not fully enclosed.

What would you recommend?

Philips.

Are you sure you have the same set up for voltage and resistance? If you don't you'll pass more current and burn out faster. Similar to a laptop marketing saying 14hrs, but that's only if you leave it on low power, airplane mode, and don't do anything useful. I'm curious to see if someone comments the real answer.

The bulbs themselves are amazing. There are good ones in cars and computers, the flash of phones etc.

The failure point is typically the electronic components that run or regulate it. And of course most companies want to sell more bulbs so they conveniently skimp on that stuff. So maybe the answer is a more expensive bulb that hopefully will last long enough to justify the extra cost?

Generally because you're buying cheaper ones that aren't built as well. Heat destroys LEDs and the cheap bulbs generally use fewer individual LEDs running at higher power to produce a given output in lumens. More expensive bulbs use more LEDs at lower power to achieve the same light output so that they're not constantly being overdriven and last much longer.