If you find yourself strolling past 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California, you'll find a fire station that, more than likely, will contain groups of visitors staring at the ceiling. The object capturing their attention is a light bulb that's been continuously lit for 119 years, outshining multiple presidencies, wars and species.

For Jake Dyson, the centennial bulb forms part of the foundation for his vision of the future of lighting, a world in which lights not only last a lifetime but are smart enough to offer the absolute best lighting conditions no matter who or where you are. It's these core principles that make up Dyson's latest product, the Lightcycle Morph.

At £500 for the desk model, and £650 for the floor model, they're far from cheap, but in typical Dyson fashion every little detail and feature has been engineered to near perfection.

For starters, the Morph features the same heat pipe technology featured in the original Lightcycle, which means it'll last for a whopping 60 years with no performance degradation, while running cooler and using less energy than other LEDs in the process. While that's still not hitting the century mark, its a huge step forward in Dyson's fight against planned obsolescence. Other manufacturers, take note.

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It's lit

The Lightcycle Morph is designed to, well, morph, into four different configurations, thanks to a double-hinged arm and 360-degree rotating LED head, which feels as smooth and as solid as you'd expect from a Dyson product.

The configuration is a reading lamp-like position that provides a focused, powerful light that's designed to reduce eyestrain while reading, drawing or doing any other activity that requires precision and focus.

If you're after some softer room-filling light, you can rotate the head towards a wall for some indirect background lighting, while its manoeuvrability also makes the Morph ideal for lighting up hanging artwork or sculptures.

Fold the head in on itself and you'll be treated to a very satisfying click. That's the sound of a magnetic cover popping up to lock the LED in place, focusing all of its light through the Morph's vertical stand, which is perforated with thousands of precision-drilled holes. This gently diffuses the resulting warm, orange light, designed to replicate the soothing glow of candlelight or a fireplace.

So far so good, but you're getting more than just flexibility for your money. Buried within the Morph is a 32-bit microcontroller unit, which constantly interprets daylight data comprising of over a million atmospheric lighting conditions from different times of the day. In other words, the end result is essentially the same as the Night Mode you've got on your smartphone. Light starts off warm to match the sunrise and gets cooler throughout the day, before warming up again at night. In Dyson's words, it's like having the sun in your house.

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Let there be light

The Morph's accompanying app takes things even further by letting you set your specific location so that someone in London will receive a different "sunlight" experience compared to a person in Helsinki. How subtle or obvious this effect is remains to be seen, but Dyson reckons it's precise enough to show you exactly what your make-up will look like when you're outside in natural daylight.

The app also lets you manually override the brightness and warmth as you see fit, while also providing settings for a light alarm, which lets the Morph gently nudge you awake with a gradually brightening natural light. We'd take that over a piercing alarm any day, but it's probably best to get used to it before ditching your alarm for good.

Other tricks include a motion-detecting mode that will come in handy for late-night bathroom treks and there's even an option for you to provide your age. The latter lets the Morph take your specific eyes into account, as, apparently, a 65-year-old requires up to four times more light as a 20-year-old.

Unsurprisingly there's an ambient light sensor thrown in as well, which lets the Morph instantly adjust its warmth and brightness when the shy British sun decides to peek out from behind the clouds and flood your desk with light. Oh, and there's a USB-C port built into the stand, for easy device charging too, just in case there wasn't already enough tech thrown in for you.

Should you buy it?

"I think lasers have a part to play in the future of lighting," Dyson told us at the launch event in Milan. While he couldn't elaborate for fear of revealing his future plans, this one sentence perfectly encapsulates his drive to constantly push the boundaries of innovation, using anything and everything imaginable.

As for you, do you really need a £500 lamp that knows your age and can calculate the precise atmospheric lighting conditions of your exact location? Arguably not.

If, however, you share the same passion for perfection, and pushing boundaries, then to you the Lightcycle Morph is probably more than a mere lamp – it's a symbol for how every product we use can and should be made. Learn more at Dyson.co.uk.

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