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The Man Who Went Through 11 Xbox 360s
1up is carrying the sad story of Justin Lowe. Just your average gamer, wanting to partake of the current generation of consoles. He's got a PSP, DS, PS3, and a 360. He really likes his 360 ... which is probably a good thing, since he's sent 11 of them back to Microsoft. He's now on his twelfth. The piece covers Justin's ongoing plight, and discusses Microsoft's claims of hardware failures being a 'vocal minority'. "Justin has not had a working system for longer than a month or two. The list of problems is almost comically large: three red lights of death, two with disc read errors, two dead on arrival, several with random audio and video-related issues and one that actually exploded. Looking at the situation through Moore's own standards, how has Microsoft performed? 'On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate them an 8... at first,' says Lowe. His [first] 360 broke in early January, just a few weeks after purchase."
There are probably environmental factors going on here. I'm not a gamer, but several friends who are have had no problems with their Xbox360 hardware.
The article (yes, I RTFA) seems to point the blame at Microsoft and say, "See! See! They're shipping with an extra heat-sink! It MUST be all their fault!"
I have 20+ friends with 360s, and none of them have experienced problems with their 360s. I have a hard time believing disc read errors, separate audio and visual problems, DOA and exploding consoles are ALL caused by the lack of a heatsink. Like a customer that comes back to PetsMart with dead fish after dead fish, I have trouble believing after 8 dead fish that ALL of the problem is PetsMart selling defective fish.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Statistically, there is always that one guy. You know the guy; wins the lottery, gets hit by a meteor, eats a thousand big macs and doesn't die, gets rich of a get rich quick scheme.
.03^11 (a 5.31441x10^-17 percent chance that you'd have 11 crap out in a row), though you're also taking that 3% with a huge grain of salt because it's a percentage of failures over an undisclosed period of time, which could be a month, a day, or a year for all we know. Obviously the percentage chance of failure would be 100%, given enough time.
Yea. That guy.
This is the "Guy who gets broken Xbox 360s." Out of all the people who have them, there's got to be one guy who always gets a bad one.
Still, MS claims the failure rate is around 3%, so that's pretty fricking improbable assuming that they're not lying...We're talking
If I were them, I'd start looking for an external factor. Does he live in an area with an unusually large number of electrical storms per year? Does he have bad wiring? Does he live in a really dusty environment? Is he a huge slob? Does he have the UPS guy from hell? Even if the failure rate on a 360 was 10% (which would be really hard to hide), the odds would still be 100,000,000 to 1 against getting 11 bad ones in a row...'Course they could be sending out refurbs to people who have problems, which very well may have a significantly higher fail rate...
Bah. Puppy needs more data.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm sure I'll get flamed to heck for this, but really, MS should be praised for this.
Really, honestly, if a customer bought something, then brought it back broken, 11 FREAKING TIMES in a row, do you really think most retailers would keep accepting it back, over and over again? Eventually they'd be blaming it on you and refusing to take it back. Instead, MS doesn't seem to care much that this guy has the worlds worst mean failure rate, and aside from getting him to check his wiring, they keep sending him new ones without much question. My personal experience just trying to return my malfunctioning video card twice (well, the first time was the repair return, the second time was because they sent me back the exact same physical card, without repairing it first) tells me that most retailers are complete asshats, and will happily blame you if they can possibly get away with it.
Many other retailers would cut you off or make you start paying, and you wouldn't really have much success complaining "hey, I broke my xbox 10 times in a row, and now they won't send me a replacement for free!". MS keeps pumping them out. They get a +1 in my book for that.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
The replacements were refurbished broken X-boxes in the first place, which didn't get the same quality of service check on the way out the door as a new one might.
Who's to say, but it would explain why the replacements have been buggy, where a new one might not be.
Then again, maybe they were all new.
It's easy to blame the victim, that way you don't have to listen to his problem because he asked for it.
It's not likely that XBox failure rates are >20% (as another poster indicated would be necessary to randomly pick 11 successive failures). It's probably something much simpler like a repair division, refurbishing returned machines and shipping them as replacements. Such a strategy looks good from a business point of view, as you get to "recover" some of cost of failed hardware. However, should the diagnosis be wrong or incomplete, or if the repair center lacks the resources of the production center, your return will be substantially less reliable than a new machine.
Perhaps he chain smokes and his long haired dog likes to cuddle the machine for warmth while his apartment shakes as trains pass outside tossing droplets of condensing water from his window air conditioner into he beloved XBox 360 which is struggling to deal with the 118 Volt 66 Hz electricity. That still doesn't mean that he deserves to put up with the hassle of replacing his system 11 times. If the repair centers note excessive dog hair, water exposure, vibrational damage, dropping, etc. they should notify him and not entertain a 12th replacement. The fact that they are still returning replacements without cutting him off implies that they know they have bigger problems than an abusive customer.
I'm not saying that gaming systems needs to be mil-spec, but from the descriptions I've heard, the XBox 360 isn't the most robust machine out there. I doubt that they could ALL be wrong, even with the skweaky wheels making more noise.
I've had the opposite problem. XBox and PS3 run fine, but I had to send in my Wii because the graphics chip went sour.
I think the moral of the story is "hardware breaks".
Well, think about it. If every UPS delivery person was drop kicking Amazon.com boxes, Amazon would either sue, or start shipping USPS or FedEx. If a single individual mails a box that is damaged, it may be called a "freak accident" by the company, and good luck proving otherwise.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?