Because you are using them wrong.
But it’s not your fault…
Allow me to explain:
For roughly ever, we used incandescent bulbs, that work by getting hot. That’s the whole point. We designed all of our light fixtures around the thing inside of them getting really hot, and often trying to keep the things around that fixture from getting hot.
But LED’s flip that around. Heat is the enemy of LED bulbs. More specifically, heat is the enemy of the little power supply or “driver” that provides the proper power to an LED bulb.
The actual “light emitting diodes” generate heat, but they aren’t actually very vulnerable to it. But in an LED bulb, that by design has to be small, that power supply is right next to the hot little LED’s, and they will heat that power supply up.
And if the bulb isn’t reasonably well ventilated, that power supply will cook.
Put that above your dining room table, and those bulbs will probably last near their stated life.
In this “boob light”:
Expect the bulbs to last a fraction of their rated life.
Even if you get the “enclosure rated” bulbs, the fine print is often that they are rated for a single bulb in the enclosure… Not two or three.
Generally speaking, LED manufactures do a shit tier job of helping customers understand the bulbs they are buying, leading to broad dissatisfaction among buyers.
When buying an LED bulb, consider the following:
- Lumens. This, not watts, is what should define brightness. A lot of manufactures use things like “60 watt equivalent”, but they play a lot of fuck-fuck games with the numbers, making those untrustworthy. Lumens, by contrast, should be properly rated.
- Color temperature. Manufactures love to call this shit like “warm white/cool white/bright white/daylight/whatever” I don’t know what the fuck that means. Actual color temperature is a number between ~2000 and ~6000, where higher numbers are more blue. A lot of people think that this is about brightness, but it’s not. So they buy high color temperature bulbs, and are disappointed in that it makes everything look wrong to them. If you want to match old style incandescents, you want bulbs that are 2800K. Personally, I prefer slightly higher numbers, between 3000 and 3500. Others may prefer different numbers, and your application can vary. Home decor choices can also influence what you want your lighting color to be.
- CRI, or color rendering index. The higher the number, the better. Some cheap bulbs have a very poor CRI, and this can cause things to look “wrong”.
So get bulbs that match your needs in those areas, and don’t put them in enclosed fixtures, and you’ll generally be very happy with LED bulbs.