Zebralight has traditionally targeted the enthusiast market. Nobody would tell Ferrari to build weaker cars so that soccer moms could drive them more easily.
The enthusiast market alone can't sustain growth, which is the reason ZL has been toying with e.g. "Eco" line and such. If you want to expand, naturally you'd want to appeal to a wider audience, most of which can't so much as to fathom the fact that a flashlight can have 20+ modes or require parts you need to scour the Internet for, pray they can be shipped to your location, and also require specific chargers that aren't sold in Walmart. The battery search aspect in particular is pretty off-putting. Even here at CPF people who are supposed to be "enthusiasts" are asking questions about protected cells and manufacturers all the time. It's far from a convenient situation. The vast majority of people prefer the device manufacturer taking care of everything they don't feel entirely safe or sure about.
I just don't like being tied down with proprietary parts.
But... you aren't. There are no proprietary parts—it's the same old 18650 cells inside. You will still be able to disassemble and mod/service the light at your own risk, just like people do now with other parts of ZL lights—it's just that it will be outside the scope of ZL's customer support. This works out just fine because they won't have to spend time and effort dealing with human errors, which frees up their resources.
But I just don't like the idea of having to rely on the manufacturer for future service/upgrades, especially at additional cost.
But you already pay an additional cost for the new set of batteries and shipping; this isn't significantly different. Besides, you don't
have to rely on a particular manufacturer to replace the battery after the warranty period. I sure as hell didn't send my first SC600 to ZL for modding—I asked vinhnguyen54 to do it (and that was before his mods became the big thing here!
).
If this happens to be one's first 18650 light, which might just be the general case for the "muggles", they also skip the need to choose and buy a charger (and a fireproof bag, like some particularly wary people). This saves money and time (= more money). Obviously a win/win situation for the muggles.
There's no reason the driver in one of these lights shouldn't last for decades. The emitter, too.
Well, if you don't use it, sure.
Tools in heavy use are subject to wear and tear, however—I've already broken the lens on one of my lights once, which could've been fatal for the emitter. And nobody guarantees the 18650s will still be in use in decades, either—which is something people here tend to take for granted. EVs and power tools are moving on to 20700/21700, laptops have all but ditched cylindrical cells entirely. Those have historically been the three major markets for the 18650; flashlights and other portable electronics (e.g. powerbanks) don't even amount to 0.1% of these by sheer demand numbers. Have you considered where you'd be getting your spares if 18650 goes the way of the dodo in a decade or less? Are you going to stockpile them in your fridge?
So to artificially limit the lifespan of the product for little gain makes no sense to me. And the argument that it will somehow be "obsolete" before the battery dies doesn't work for me either. This flashlight will make perfectly serviceable light for decades, even if there's better stuff on the market. [...] I know that a lot of us here dump last year's model light as soon as something new (and hopefully marginally better) comes along, but that's not how most people approach these things, and it shouldn't be required.
I was under the impression that the times when people would change the technology they used because the new one was required have long gone in general. Out of curiosity, how many electronic devices that remain operational after 10+ years do you still use regularly? I know for sure that since 2006 I've fully upgraded my PC and all of my flashlights twice, changed three mobile phones, a laptop, a DAP, a vacuum cleaner, and a TV in the living room. I didn't do it because the old ones stopped working—I did it because the accumulated quality-of-life improvement offered by new technologies at a low-enough price point was well worth the "premature" switch—so much so that not making it felt like a disservice to myself. That is the main deciding factor nowadays.
Let me try to explain why obsolescence is a more serious thing than people tend to give it credit for. Indeed, the
purposes of using a flashlight or other devices haven't really changed—but the ways we use them have. Whenever a new technology enables a usage scenario that wasn't possible or convenient previously, it creates an opportunity cost, i.e.
"what I would lose by not moving on to this product at this point". The most successful, groundbreaking products are those that create the largest opportunity cost—either by enabling completely new usage scenarios (e.g. the original iPhone, which changed how we use our phones) or by making several old ones significantly more convenient across the board (e.g. Tesla Model S, which is on track to outperform gasoline-based cars in every single aspect).
For instance, while nearly everyone around me was jumping on tablet PC bandwagon, I was holding out and using my PC or laptop. But when there appeared a tablet that was 1) small and light enough to be comfortably held with one hand and carried in a pocket, 2) powerful enough to chew anything I threw at it, including full-HD video encoded with heavy duty settings, 3) waterproof, so I could take it to a seashore or wash it in tap water, 4) with good enough battery to last a full day of regular activity, and 5) with good enough screen that reading or watching movies on it wasn't any less comfortable than on my TV or PC monitor, it was obvious that I would increase my quality of life
massively by investing in this device despite the fact that other things I used for the same tasks were still in working order. Indeed, ever since I've done that, I've saved myself a lot of time and effort that would've otherwise been spent using devices not fit for a given task (e.g. my phone, which is too small and weak—because that's how I want my phone to be) or those too unwieldy for it (e.g. my laptop, which I can't carry around everywhere). I paid for the
convenience that made certain other things partly or fully obsolete for a given task, and I ended up absolutely better off for it. Do I lament the fact that the battery in my tablet isn't serviceable? Not really—that's the price to pay for things that are more important for me in such a device. If it somehow manages to survive until its battery gives out (which I expect to happen sometime in the next two years), I'll either take it to a service center and replace the battery, or buy a better tablet which will surely become available by then. It's not a big deal either way. I can't expect manufacturers to make legacy spare parts available forever because that's just not economically viable. It's the flip side of rapid progress; you get either one or the other.
Besides, the "huge leaps" in LED tech are starting to slow down, don't you think? 80+ and 90+ CRI emitters are commonplace, and I would venture that most of us can't really tell the difference between 90 CRI and 100 (although I'm sure we all want 100 CRI emitters). And we've got much better tint options now than we did half a decade ago (and the visible light spectrum isn't getting any wider).
Admittedly, I haven't been paying very close attention, but I don't think so, no. Most of the options you're talking about only appeared on the market during the last 1.5-2 years or so. The fact that maximum brightness in mass-production lights has jumped up by ~40% to ~130% depending on the power source in this same time frame doesn't quite scream "slow down" to me, either. I would say it progresses much faster than it did in the 1.5 years of XP-G dominance (mid-2010 to late 2011) or the 1.5 years of XM-L's dominance (late 2011 to mid-2013). During these periods of time there was basically only one non-awful LED option for a high-power light, and you'd only have the incredible choice between 65 CRI CW and 75 CRI NW with something like 15–17% less output. If you wanted >80 CRI, you'd have to make do with a horribly weak and inefficient Philips or Nichia LED, or something even worse. Every choice was a painful compromise. The only functional replacement for XM-L was expected to be XM-L2, with no comparable options on the horizon, and XM-L2 itself was only 25% more powerful at most. We had to wait two years for a 20–25% increase in output at the same wattage, and that was considered a steady progress. Funny, right?
In the last 2.5–3 years, however, the choice of concurrently usable emitters jumped up to something like 4+ depending on the size, purpose, and battery you want to use, most having at least 2-3 further options in terms of color temperature and/or rendition, with 6V LEDs taking a hold of the large lights and slowly trickling down to 1x18650 lights, and AA-based lights also being able to take much better advantage of powerful single-die LEDs as well, pushing 500 lm on a single eneloop. The industry is in better shape and progressing at a higher pace than ever before, and LEDs themselves are becoming better across the board—you don't have to choose between light output and quality or max output and efficiency anymore. In fact, we've only recently arrived at the point where tint choice has become a preference rather than a necessity, since the difference in output has shrunk to 5–7% at most. The efficiency itself has increased from 180–190 lm/W it shuffled at in 2012–2013 to over 220 lm/W in 2016, and we haven't even seen what the upcoming XM-L3 will be capable of. Similarly, if ~2200 lm was just about the limit you'd get out of the most powerful single-LED production lights in 2012–2013 (using the horribly power-hungry Luminus emitters at that), we're now looking at up to 5000 lm from a single power-efficient LED—that's more than a twofold jump. The only thing I find worrying in all of that is that Cree has completely destroyed any competition it had, which is never good for consumers in long term. I mean they've even made automotive xenon arc lightbulbs technically obsolete, now they're just competing with themselves.
The main course of further improvements, as I see it, will be (and already has been, in fact) in gradual trickling of larger-light performance into smaller-light form factors. Large lights are severely limited in their usage, and can't always be there when needed. The only problem of small lights is that they aren't always
enough. The latter can certainly be improved over time, the former... less so, in principle. Eventually, perhaps in 10–15 years or so, high-performance flashlights won't ever exceed the size of something like ZL S6330 or Lux-RC FB1 because they won't
need to, and pocketable EDC lights will cover about 99% of real-world usage scenarios handsomely.
Well, there's one other place I see big room for improvement -- battery tech. But if we seal the batteries in our devices then we won't be able to take advantage of those gains.
Portable electronics and EVs haven't had user-serviceable batteries for years (if ever), and somehow this didn't impede the progress nor consumer interest. The main reason there haven't been any huge leaps in energy density, in my opinion, is that the dominant chemistry (lithium/cobalt-based cathodes in particular) hasn't changed in a while. But with multiple technologies under development and the big money behind automotive industries being heavily poured into accelerating the development and production, that will also change in foreseeable future. We will be able to take advantage of it either way, no need to worry.
