Since this is HN I'll mention how this reminds me of the blue-LED invasion.
Of course a much less serious issue (no lives at stake), but it will never cease to mystify me why they still put these blinding blue LEDs into everything (even my toaster has them).
I don't know anyone (including non-technical people) who likes them. I know many people who put tape over them or paint them with nail polish (a great tip btw).
I've heard arguments that they look good in shops, resulting in more sales, but I have trouble believing that since everyone I know actively avoids them...
The problem isn't the color per se, it's the brightness. Blue LEDs are very efficient, and if run at the same current levels as red or green ones that used to be more popular, are insanely bright.
About 15 years ago, when blue LEDs were rare and expensive, I built a piece of equipment and decided to use one as a power indicator. As I said above, driving it with the same current (about 10 milliamps) as I was used to doing with a red LED, basically lit up the whole room. Dropping the current to a fraction of that gave it a nice, almost subtle blue/purple glow that it still maintains to this day.
I think the underlying problem is an engineer somewhere was taught to drive indicator LEDs at 10 mA and then saying, "screw it, it's good enough to ship." People just don't care about aesthetics anymore.
As blue LEDs are much brighter (at least perceptually), they need to be dimmed down a lot to be reasonable in many applications.
Unfortunately when the OMG-blue-LED fad first hit, many manufacturers apparently just treated them like other colors, and didn't modify their designs to account for the brightness difference, resulting in the searchlight-in-the-eye experience.
My perception is that things seem to have gotten a bit better since, with designs being modified to make blue LEDs less blinding, or manuf.s just switching back to more traditional colors....
I bought a pack of 400 small round black stickers because of blue leds. For some of the leds it takes two to cover them fully, or one will dim it enough to be acceptable.
Of course a much less serious issue (no lives at stake), but it will never cease to mystify me why they still put these blinding blue LEDs into everything (even my toaster has them).
I don't know anyone (including non-technical people) who likes them. I know many people who put tape over them or paint them with nail polish (a great tip btw).
I've heard arguments that they look good in shops, resulting in more sales, but I have trouble believing that since everyone I know actively avoids them...