Electrical tape to black it out.

Painters tape to dim it.

I get to be that guy! I'm so excited!

In power strips, the lights are (in the overwhelming majority of cases) actually a neon bulb! They're cheaper for that specific purpose because they can be powered directly off of the mains power with a single resistor.

Your point is entirely valid and I bear the same cross, this is just a fun fact you can use to impress colleagues, strangers, and potential lovers, dazzling them with your deep esoteric knowledge of and passion for illuminators in power strips.

Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays

I have a similar complaint about almost all "gamer gear" having RGB lighting. Why would I want that? I'm not even opposed to the "gamer" aesthetic of a lot of sharp lines and strong colors, I think that can look really good, but when my mousepad has RGB it's time to blow the whistle and stop all manufacturing until we can figure out what's going on.

I design electronics sometimes. Generally, people want an indicator light on their product, since it's a cheap way to show the state of a system.

The main problem is, the human eye adapts to darkness. You can still clearly see an LED in a dark room when a few microamperes pass through them, but then they are useless in brighter light in that case. There's no specific amount of current that produces light that's bright enough in a lit room, but isn't too bright in a dark room.

I can fix that by occasionally turning off the LED and measuring voltage across it (LEDs detect light in addition to emitting it), then dimming it if I'm in a dark room. However, this is quite complicated to do and requires a capable microcontroller and a pretty ninja embedded systems programmer. Most product developers I know won't think of specifically doing this.

Finally, I can save 0.1 cents (plus board space plus assembly complexity, which cost more) by connecting an LED directly to the pins of a microcontroller instead of using a resistor to limit current. Some microcontrollers specifically allow this, up to 10 or 20 milliamperes, which is enough to be too bright in some contexts already. Margins on hardware manufacture are extremely thin, so optimizing even 1 cent off a board is pretty important.

All of this together leads to a lot of LED proliferation, which I' don't like either. The stuff I build for myself often has a way to control the LED brightness, although this would be too expensive to add to a consumer product as a general rule. For small devices, there's a tilt switch inside that turns off the indicator LEDs if you turn it upside down and hold it for a few seconds. That way you can just reach over at night and fix it without fiddling for switches or controls.

Electrical engineer here who also does hobby projects. I'm with you. I think some of the reason may be that modern GaN-type green or blue LEDs are absurdly efficient, so only a couple mA of drive current is enough to make them insanely bright.

When I build LEDs into my projects, for a simple indicator light, I might run them at maybe only a tenth of a milliamp and still get ample brightness to tell whether it is on or not in a lit room. Giving them the full rated 10 or 20mA would be blindingly bright. I also usually design most things with a hard on/off switch so they can be turned all the way off when not in use.

Of things I own normally I also have two power strips with absurdly bright LEDs to indicate the surge protection. It lights up my whole living room with the lights off. If I had to have something like that in my bedroom, I would probably open it up and disconnect the LEDs in some way, or maybe modify the resistor values to run at the lowest current I could get away with.

I feel like designers have lost sight of the fact that these lights are meant to be indicators only-- i.e. a subtle indication of the status of something and not trying to light a room-- and yet they default to driving them at full blast as if they were the super dim older-gen LEDs from 20+ years ago.

Next level pro-tip: Use a "dot" or dab of dark nail polish to tone down the intensity. It's more permanent than the tape method but will allow you to see if the LED is on or off so doesn't remove functionality.

Because they’re cheap and look “modern/futuristic” so shit manufacturers love them. I have also used electrical tape on power strips, chargers, smoke detectors, etc

I have a lamp and that has an LED that is on all the time.

Why would a lamp have a permanently on LED? That's what I get for getting cheap crap from China, rather than premium crap from China.

I don't seem to find it mentioned: LEDs at night are terrible for your sleep, especially the blue ones. Among other things they suppress the melatonin release.

An article that goes into more detail and provides a citations for further research.

Agree. When my DVD player back in 2000 came with a bright blue power-on LED, that crap started to bother me. Sitting right under the TV, so watching anything in a darkened room means I had that fucker blinding me all the time. Nothing a little duct tape can't fix, but that's not exactly helping.

Ever since I've been actively avoiding devices where I can't dim & disable the LEDs.

It's hard to find a PC case that doesn't look like a disco.

Or how every appliance needs to have an alarming beeeeeeep to alert you its done. Like its cool that you finished sterilizing our babies bottles but it wasn't really urgent...

I miss the days of red LEDs. I understand blue were new and novel at one point but that's passed.

I recently bought new USB-C cables to use on my nightstand and when they arrived I saw they have an LED ring with a flowing rainbow pattern. Are you kidding me? Just why.

The team that invented blue LEDs won a nobel prize.

Now every fucking item in my room has a beacon that would put the eye of fucking Sauron to shame.

100% agree with you, and have started destroying LEDs where possible.

I've taken too darkening them with a sharpie.

What drives me nuts is all of the light fixtures that have Integrated LED bulbs in them.

They make regular LED bulbs to put into fixtures, there's no reason for the stupid integrated LEDs. LED bulbs give you the option of choosing brightness and tone.

And sure, integrated bulbs may be rated to last 20 years, but the circuitry and drivers controlling those bulbs are not. You'll be lucky to get 5 years out of it, and then you have to toss the whole thing away and buy a new one and install it again.

I don’t know if this is the right place to complain about this but since it’s LED related.. Why are all the automakers putting the brightest fucking LED’s in their new vehicles now?? They are legit brighter then how high beams used to be only a few years back!!

What did we all used to do when headlights used to be slightly yellow??

I have opened up devices to physically remove the led. SMD LEDs stand no chance against a steady hand and a precision flathead screwdriver.

You’ve reminded to tape off the blinking blue LED on my monitor, it’s been driving me nuts when I’m trying to sleep!

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?

The gradual spread of light pollution has gotten crazy, and people still don't really notice it. We're at the point that it's actually driving insects to extinction. If you look somewhere rural vs. urban the difference in what constitutes "night" is mindblowing, and rural areas are getting brighter all the time themselves.

I've been covering LEDs with tape the last 20 years, televisions and media players in particular. Who in their right mind decides to build a DVD player with a damn blue laser led in the front panel to blind your movie experience?

Smoke detectors that blink once every ten minutes to let you know that there is nothing going on, with a light that could be mistaken for an electrical fire. Open up, cover LED hole with tape, careful not to disrupt smoke sensing capabilities, close up. Now the LED is visible when looking for it.

Get yourself a cheap pack of various coloured electrical tapes. Tin foil when it's not enough.

From an electronic tech perspective... I've been replacing the LEDs in anything that annoys me with a dull red and a resistor valued to keep it barely visible. It's a tad more eloquent than tape. Most things don't need a led at all. I'd love to see manufacturers switch to an e paper solution with a simple "on" or "off" displayed. And I hate standby led's.

Thought I read somewhere it’s cheaper to get these super bright LEDs, so they use those rather than something easier on the eye.

I work in IT, LEDs are useful for diagnostics.

Why blue? No idea.

Who asked for this? Nobody, as far as I can tell.... They just switched, and didn't ask anyone for an opinion on it.

Why so bright? Because modern LEDs are generally pretty darn bright.... When these are used as an indicator instead of an actual light source, I'm scratching my head just as much as you are. I'm immune to the light problem when sleeping; I understand some have that problem, but it's not me. Generally I'm unbothered by device LEDs, but I'm not the majority. I'd rather go back to the old, barely visible LEDs used on 386 computers, they did the job and didn't burn a hole in your retina doing it.

I hate this trend.

I'm quite sensitive to light, and some of these LED's are stupid.

Obviously you need that idle indicator light to give off more lumens than a 2D Maglite all night long right?

I used to work in electronics manufacturing. I won't give my title because it was a shit title and didn't describe what I did well at all. I think that was on purpose to keep our salaries low.

I engineered final assembly test systems. Like the product fully completed. Most of these devices were commercial in nature.

My man, the testers fucking LOVED LEDs. Because LEDs not turning on correctly always means the device fails.

I hated them, because was really fucking hard to automate testing of LEDs. LEDs emit a wavelength, or combination of RGB. Because of the brilliance of my sales engineers, we used computer vision to automate this testing, NOT sensors. The reasoning? Much denser LED placements.

But guess what happens when your supply chain and manufacutirng is entirely Chinese and your product is designed and prototyped and originally manufactured here? YOU GET THE WRONG FUCKING COLOR CALIBRATED. I'm not shitting you, it was a tiny difference in Red wavelength. Tiny. but computer vision doesn't read wave length, it reads color.

LEDs make testing easy for humans. If you just need to see them light up? Everything is great. Bonus points for brighter LEDs for faster moving tests. Faster moving tests = more profit. Human testers means you don't spend money on automated testing and and can quickly repurpose humans to see if an LED is on.

My in-laws power outlets throughout the whole house have always on LEDs on them. It drives me crazy. My mother in law likes it and says they are like night lights, but the whole house is so bright at night.

I think we should also have a review on non-functional (decorative) LEDs on the gadgets we buy, especially those cheap chargers that decide to light up the whole room with blue.

I know your rage.

I ended up buying LED dimming stickers off Amazon and went hog wild on all the devices in the house.

I regularly take nail polish and paint over these infernal LEDs in layers until they are at a brightness that I find acceptable. Red are not so bad, but blue LEDs area nightmare. I have a cheap Chinese headlamp were the blue battery indicator is brighter than the red led for illumination, and the blue reflects off my glasses into my eyes.