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Microsoft Evasive on 360 Hardware Changes
From all reports Microsoft has upgraded the Xbox 360 consoles coming from their factories, and modified the consoles heading back to consumers from service calls. The trouble is, they're having a hard time admitting it. The company has always maintained there aren't any excessive heat problems with their console, so admitting now that they've added extra heatsink capabilities would be ... somewhat embarrassing. Dean Takahashi at the San Jose Merc has an interview with Todd Holmdahl, the 'hardware guy' at Microsoft: "We're very proud of the box. We think the vast majority of people are having just a great experience. You look at the number of games they are buying, the number of accessories they are buying, the Live attach. They love the box. They continue to buy the box. That said, we take any customer issue very seriously. We continue to look into these things very deeply. You have seen we have made some changes to our customer service policy."
I love AC trolls....
"And if 'they have a fix' why is it usual for 360 owners to already be on their third or fourth machines?"
If it was usual it would be on front pages on national news site, money sites (since that would hurt MS a lot), etc. But wait it isn't. So either MS is doing a fine good job of covering it up or you are full of crap.
Funny I know lots pf people (myself included) with 360s. Of the 15 or so one is on their 2nd console that cost them nothing under the warranty. It's hardware some will have issues. You act like every 360 owner is having issues.
One issue which is often overlooked is the way MSFT handles returned (broken) units. Instead of sending back a brand-new unit every time, they've got this pool of refurb units, which appear to be largely a pile of lemons, meaning that the moment someone hits a bad, new unit, chances are that s/he will receive refurb units which'll fail soon as well, for the simple fact that they're lemons with more defects than MSFT seems to be able to fix.
This would explain why a significant number of people have gone through 3-4 units before receiving one which doesn't give a RROD or such after a few weeks/months. It'd also indicate that the bottom line is more important to MSFT than good customer service.
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I have one of the ORIGINAL original 360's - I won it from Mountain Dew's EveryTenMinutes.com promotion. So I've literally had my 360 at leat two days longer than anyone...other than the other ETM winners. I have played the tar out of standard games on that thing both with and without Live, played a bunch of movies on it, and hours and hours of Arcade on it. I've played single player, two-player, and even three and four player both online and off. For all the hype about issues with the 360, I have had not one second of trouble with it (other than the well-documented headset crapping out in GRAW2, which seems to be more a GRAW2 thing than anything else).
So at least in my case, my free 360 works just fine, thank you very much. See you on Live.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
I don't recommend you buy an XBox 360. In fact, I recommend against it.
That's because I own one. I bought it about two months ago.
I had read about the problems with overheating, the unit being loud, and it's fragility. But, I wanted to play a few games. So, I bought the console, Viva Pinta, and Gears Of War. It cost me well over $600.00. This was just after they announced that they would warranty the console for 1 year, rather than the pitiful and embarrassing 90 days that they would previously warrantee their hardware against defects.
I like both games, and the wireless controllers are really good, but the console hardware has problems.
I was very surprised and disappointed at just how loud and hot the console got. It's so loud that you either need to cover it inside of a cabinet or just put up with not being able to hear your own TV/speakers over the cooling fans.
Crashing is also a problem. I have to turn on the air cooler in my home before I start playing, or the console will crash. I learned this after it started getting warm this summer. I don't think I can ever recall a console crashing on me before Microsoft got into the business -- even the original XBox was trouble free for me.
I can't really do anything to fix the situation. But, I can warn you, potential buyer, to try the Wii instead. It's cheaper, stable, quiet, and now has just about as many quality games as XBox 360 has.
I'd really love to be wrong about the XBox 360, but you can't ignore the countless flood of legitimate complaints from owners.