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Microsoft Extends 360 Warranty to One Year
Gamasutra reports that Microsoft has extended the warranty on the Xbox 360, giving consumers one year from their date of purchase to receive essentially free repairs. This is being done to put the U.S. and Canada in line with the warranty offered in other parts of the globe, and is retroactive. From the article: "... [C]onsumers who may have already paid for an out-of-warranty Xbox 360 repair within one year of purchase will be eligible for reimbursement of their console repair charges. Microsoft notes that those who have already paid for such repair charges within their first year of ownership can expect reimbursement checks for the amount of their console repair in approximately 10 weeks. The company adds that reimbursements will be automatically distributed, so customers do not need to contact Microsoft directly."
Does that mean it's now the 365?
Thank goodness. 90 days just isn't long enough to find all design flaws in a product, especially if you consider that there are probably a bunch of Xbox 360s sitting around in closets or under trees for a month or so before they actually get used. I wonder how many people didn't buy an Xbox 360 because of the really short warranty. I also wonder how many people are going to kick themselves now for buying one of those ripoff extended warranties.
I got mine at Micro Center a couple of weeks ago, which is currently offering a $100 rebate on both the core nad pro systems. If I were Microsoft, though, I'd be really pissed off at Micro Center. I had one sales person on the floor ask several times if I wanted to upgrade the 90-day warranty. "Are you sure? It's a great deal! And look at what you get!..." Of course being intelligent, I turned it down, over and over, ad nauseum.
When I got to the cash register, the checkout person asked yet again. When I declined, she actually said, "You really should get it. A lot of people have been bringing them back."
If I were even the least bit paranoid, I would have simply left my $600 or so of merchandise (the system, plus a couple of games, a controller, and a battery charger) sitting right there on the counter and walked out. Why the hell would I buy a product that the store clerks keep telling me, and seem convinced to the core, is defective? If I were Microsoft, I'd be tempted to stop selling any Xbox 360s to Micro Center at all. Stores telling customers repeatedly that your product is broken is most heinously not cool.
Fortunately, I'm not as gullible as a lot of people, and I'm not so willing to part with my sixty-something dollars for something that is statistically highly unlikely to happen.
Maybe this will help to take some of the wind out of their "sales" and get them to stop trying to scare the hell out of their customers.
Still, a hundred bucks back sure does take a little bit of the sting out of having to listen to their stupidity. If I were just a tiny bit more spiteful, I would drive up there today and tell them, "Hah hah!"
Oh, and P.S., a couple of weeks later, everything's working fine. ;-) My gamertag is Skippus. Look me up and maybe we'll throw down with some Texas Hold'em.
Hehehe. That's what I originally thought the article was about. A 360 day warranty replaced by a 365 :) That was actually rather funny :)
(As for the poster: XBOX360 would've been slightly more clear....)
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
freudian slip?
He called up this morning and they issued him a $140 refund for his previous repair bill. Unfortunately it's by check.. His experience here: http://emeraldcoasttech.com/gamut/?p=21
Stores push those warranties so hard because they're pretty much pure profit.
I particularly liked when I bought an $8 universal remote from best buy and they asked me if I wanted the service plan for it for $6.
1) Its an $8 remote. I kind of expect it to break.
2) Why would I pay %75 of the purchase price for a potential replacement in one year? If it breaks, I'll just buy a new one.
Be thankful it wasn't in rolls of nickels.
And that, is by law. Consumer electronics, including mobile phones, have a 5 year warranty on fixing 'production errors'. Any equipment that fails before that time - without the consumer having done something stupid like dropped it into the water - is considered a production error.
:)
Apple is having quite a bit of trouble with the government for trying to ignore that law.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Well as a 360 owner, this is definatley good news, considering the stories I've heard...but a good idea to prevent the hassle of repairs and warranties is to invest the 20 dollars on an intercooler, just in case, you never know when you are going to have a Madden marathon.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
It's just like the backwards compatibility mess Microsoft has 360 owners dealing with. At first Microsoft denied that anyone cared about BC and then they finally relented under pressure to implement it and ended up doing a pathetic job of it. If they had either 1) stuck to their guns and not included it people would have gotten over it and moved on or 2) sucked it up and went ahead an implemented it right from the start.
Instead Microsoft is letting problems fester and then finally after the PR damage has been done finally agreeing to address the issue. The 360 should have had a one year warranty right from the start. One of my friends is the single biggest Xbox fan in the world. A complete and out of his mind fanboy over the first Xbox. He has yet to buy a 360 due to the hardware defects and more importantly because of Microsoft's handing of the mess.
The only time I ever paid for one of these was in High-School when I bought the Radio-Shack headphones ...
The headphones cost $15 and the extended warranty was $10 (IIRC) which seems expensive except that the warranty covered everything and was 3 years long; the beauty of it was that I owned a Sony Sports Walkman at the time and ran everyday, took the bus to and from school, and so on so any headphones would last 2 weeks to a month. I must have replaced those headphones 20 times in those three years so the $10 extended warranty was certainly worth it.
On a side note, even though I believe it is a rip-off, if I were buying a PS3/XBox 360 which only had a 90 day warranty I would splurge and get the extra coverage. From what I have seen too many systems which have CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives or Hard-Drives have some sort of failure 3-12 months into the systems life to not have coverage in that time frame. (Note: I excluded the Wii because it has a 12 month warranty).
I don't know about the States but in the UK...
I've never bought of heard or any appliance that didn't come with a manufacturers 12 month guarantee.A few weeks, huh?
.... either that or I just have really, really crappy luck.
My first one, lasted all of 4 hours, my second one lasted 8 months, I'm now on my 3rd.
Sure I could have skimped and not bought the 2 year service plan that I got, but I much prefer the service I've gotten for the first 2 failures, all it took was 10 minutes and I had a new 360 ready to go, instead of waiting weeks to mail it back and have microsoft fix it.
So, enjoy your roll of the dice... but statistically speaking the odds aren't in your favor.
What tickled me last month was seeing signs in the places that push extended warranties:
"Please be advised that all video game consoles only carry a 90 day warranty."
This was news to me, since my Wii states quite clearly in the manual that it has a one year warranty. Deceptive advertising? Naaaaaah!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Nintendo offers a 1 year warrenty out of box. I was personally offered a 1 year warrenty by Gamestop. Not an additional year, just a 1 year warrenty. I didn't purchase it, but the woman behind me did. Mom probably isn't going to know or bother to check on the manufacturer warranty when she's buying Jr's Christmas present.
Its funny these extended warranty bits here in the US. In Japan where I get most of my electronics from I've never heard of or seen extended warranties in Japan. Any /.ers in Japan that can verify this?
There's no Freedom like UFP-dom
Same experience at Circuit City, where I bought my 360 almost a year ago. I've probably used it almost every day since then (games & DVDs) and I haven't had a single problem yet. Keep your fingers crossed.
My 360 has been sitting unused for at least a month now because of a 3 flashing red lights error. Conveniently for MS, it was only a few days before that my warranty expired. I decided to hold off on getting it repaired because spending half the cost of a new console for repairs seems a bit dubious at best. Now it will only cost me to ship it to them, which is far more reasonable... not to mention that the kids can now stop pestering me with their endless "When you gonna get the 360 fixed?" questions.
:O)
store plans are nice fo rthings that you don't wanbt to be going without during the replacement period, I got the 1 year plan from target on my wii so if anything goes wrong i can just bring it back and get a new one on the spot.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You should've paid for the warranty. They weren't lying. Mine died in 6 days, my roommates in 2 weeks. The xbox has already popularized terms for its failures, "The red rings of death"(the system's indicator for internal hardware failure) and "bricked"(the heavy weight, uselessness, and rectangular shape of a dead xbox360) consoles. There are a large number of reasons for Xbox360s to die.
They're issuing a 1 year warranty from date of purchase now, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a smart idea to buy an extended warranty at the time.
There's no point in adding, "Mine works." That's the implicit expectation of a product. There is no lower expectation you can have besides the product not being broken.
The class action lawsuit over microsoft breaking un-modded along with modded xbox360s with the fall update(11/30) was just in this same section of slashdot recently. Small unscientific sample of 125 polled got just over 20% having problems with their Xbox360 over in HardForum in the Console Gaming section.
This 1 year warranty won't win any gratitude, rather, it's helping to repair damage to their reputation. It's a fantastic console when it works, but considering the large amount of problems that can occur, this 1 yr warranty is just making amends.
Nevertheless, offering it after the fact is far far better than simply ignoring the problem. And their gaming division really has improved their image in my eyes.
Exactly my experience at MicroCenter. "There's lots of hardware failures." "These things overheat." etc. I mean, I've been talked up about service plans before, but never have I heard salespeople use such deceptive scare tactics to sell those plans.
Do I smell a class action lawsuit?
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
I would like to point out that, at EBGameStop at least, the 1-year warranty is a replacement warranty. If your system breaks, you bring it back and walk out with a new system.
While the Microsoft warranty is a repair warranty. Which means you have to package it up, send it to Microsoft at your expense and they'll repair or replace it at their discretion. Shipping could cost as much as the extended warranty, depending on how you ship it.
But it's up to you.
Well, your first one would have not only been well within the warranty, but well within the return policy of the store where you bought it. Just pack it up, take it back with your receipt, and get a new one.
That's really hard to believe. If it were true, then these stores (and Microsoft) would be losing money for offering these warranties, and since they don't (and in fact, as pointed out, make a huge profit from them), I'd say that the odds are much, much better that my Xbox 360 will work fine for quite a while.
If you do the math, using $60 as the figure for the two-year warranty that was offered to me, given that an Xbox Pro system costs $400, that means that for the odds to not be in my favor, one in every six Xbox 360s sold would have to break sometime between three months and two years. Actually, given that the price of the Xbox 360 will likely be much lower in two years, it would be even more than that, but for simplicity's sake, let's just say one in six.
I've heard all the stuff about overheating problems and such (I have mine in an open area, with several inches of clearance on either side of it and a foot or so above it), but come on, one in six? I'm sure that some folks have had your kind of luck and had two break, but I can't imagine one in six Xbox 360s breaking in the first two years. If it were that high, Microsoft would be positively going out of business for the number of units that would be returned in the first 90 days, and there's no way in hell they would bump that warranty up retroactively to a full year.
So thanks, I'm more than willing to roll the dice on that one, and that's a great analogy. If you pay $60 for an extended warranty, you're basically gambling $60 on your Xbox 360 breaking between 90 days and two years, a bet that almost every Xbox owner will lose when their console is still working fine after two years and beyond.
This reminds me of when I bought my PS2 in 2001 at Best Buy. The person on the floor told me I should get a replacement plan because they had "allot of bad drives", then two employees at the checkout gave me the same garbage. I asked "Are you telling me you are selling a broken product?" They said no, but they were getting allot of returns. I responded with "If I taked this thing home and it doesn't work I can bring back and exchange it for 30 days right?", and they said "Oh, uhh, sure". Bastards, extended warranties are a rip.
So what about this guy? Frying an egg on your Xbox would obviously violate the warranty, but at the time, his warranty didn't exist. So does he get repairs too? Or is he up the metaphorical creek?
The PS3 has had a 12 month warranty from day one.
To be fair, there are a couple circumstances when an extended warranty makes sense:
1) When the warranty is offered by the same company that makes the product.
2) When the cost of the warranty is less than the cheapest repair cost.
I've very thankful I bought the extended warranty on my G3 iBook from Apple, since it happened to be one of those with defective motherboards... the warranty allowed me to have it repaired for free (several times-- god that thing sucked!) and then get a new laptop once it was obvious Apple really had no working G3 iBook motherboards and I could invoke the "lemon clause" or whatever they call it. In that one particular case, the extended warranty saved me money.
Comment of the year
The xbox has already popularized terms for its failures, "The red rings of death"(the system's indicator for internal hardware failure) and "bricked"
"Bricked" is a term for dead hardware that has been around for a long time before the 360. Its failure rates may be high, but c'mon, let's not rewrite history to claim this system is solely responsible for a totally new term for dead technology. For reference search for "bricked" and "ipod" and I'm confident you'll find articles from well before the 360 launch.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
But...there ARE lots of hardware failures, and they DO overheat. Of course, lots is subjective, so really there's nothing you can do about it.
The Finnish law mandates one year warranty for *all* electronics. On top of that the law mandates warranty to extend to a time that it is reasonable to think the product should endure. What is reasonable is defined by average of the CONSUMER opinions. In other words, it's at least 1 year but for instance Xbox 360 it's reasonable to have at least roughly 3 years.
On top of that the officials enforcing the law are very ruthlessly efficient.
This was news to me, since my Wii states quite clearly in the manual that it has a one year warranty. Deceptive advertising? Naaaaaah!
In North America the Wii has a 90 day warranty extention if you register it with Nintendo. So if you look through the pile of papers, one tells you where to go to make it a 15 month warranty.
I wasn't initially excited about this news, having not had any problems with my 360 since I bought it (late Jan or early Feb of 06.) Imagine my surprise when I come home to a freeze up, error E79, then a red ring of death.
:)
Well, at least it's covered now
Both Sony & Nintendo offer one year warranties on the PS3 & Wii respectively. The Wii (at least for now) comes with a 3 month extension out of the box if you register it on www.nintedo.com (not sure if the PS3 has something similar or not).
They still tried to sell me an extended warranty at Best Buy. Even after I told them it had a one year warranty. It said so on the back of the box! I don't blame the cashier, I know he was required to ask, but companies have making profit off of other's gullibility down to a science.
just some guy
Good grief, you can't manage without a game system on the off-chance that it goes down?
Which both would have been covered under the 90-day warranty. Most items, if they are going to break, do so fairly soon. That's why the stores are happy to sell you extended warranties. They are a complete ripoff. By the way, I've had my 360 for almost a year now, still works fine.
EB offers extended warranties as well. They explain it's no questions asked... whether it's an accident or you drop it, you're fully covered and they'll simply hand you a new one when you bring it in. I've been sorely tempted to buy a game system, get the warranty, and then slam the system to the ground right then and ask for a replacement.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
We have the exact same here in the UK, except it's 6 years.