Lotta tech for the buck.

OK, we’ve said this before, but sometimes we just marvel at how quickly a miracle of technology can seem trivial, routine, mundane. We make no claims that these Smart LED Bluetooth Speaker Lightbulbs push the bleeding edge of future-forward tech. Your kids are more likely to be impressed than you are. They’re basically toys. We wouldn’t call them “junk” but we wouldn’t sue anybody who did.

And yet, think about all of the technology that goes into this unremarkable piece of consumer humdrummery that you might barely look twice at if you saw it on a store shelf.

An LED bulb…

…that burns for thousands of hours using a minuscule amount of energy…

…and that can change to any color on the visible spectrum…

…and that can dim or pulse…

…and that you can control with your phone…

…and that has a speaker built into it…

…and that speaker is wireless.

Oh, and you get a second one.

For fifteen dollars.

We’ll take some of the credit for the price. Our biggest “innovation” is our willingness to take on other people’s unwanted stuff and sell it for a smaller margin than most retailers would accept. But we can only do so much. The march of technology has to push products like this into the margins before we can afford them.

This story is about humanity’s singular ability to accumulate learning, to pile insights on top of each other, to make unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated discoveries. And now, here, today, all that aggregated innovation is yours to play with for fifteen bucks. Not bad for something that took literally thousands of years to make.