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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."
My parents run a small online retail store. When I would come home from college for breaks, I would help them with packaging and shipping. I used to handle every package like it held Ming vases, each of which was filled Faberge eggs, each of which was in turn filled with normal eggs.
And then one day I had to drive to the UPS facility. After that, it was more like footballs and sacks of potatoes - and that was an order of magnitude better than the care shown by the UPS employees. Pack your boxes well. They are paid to get your stuff there fast and cheap; 'gently' doesn't fit into that equation.
Actually, no. Failures don't follow a pure exponential, but is a bell curve. There's many possible contributing factors to failure, and particular users can be off the median on several of those, without being outside the operating requirements.
A customer's electricity, while OK, might be on the high voltage or high variation side of the OK spectrum. The room temperature, while inside the recommended range, might be on the high side. The air moisture might be lower or higher than average. Customer might have furry pets, which while not wrong, will cause a higher average failure rate. They might live in a high pollution area, or at a high altitude where air flow cools less. The weather patterns might be more extreme than normal. These (and many more) are all contributing factors that while they are within operating specs all ensures that there will be long tails on the bell curve, and certain customers that experience far more problems than others. They're not to blame either, nor is any one of these conditions a problem in itself. It's combinations, which is why you'll always get far more anomalies than you'd think.
Actually, a single dead console doesn't mean anything. One person having 11 dead consoles, however, does. If you have a hardware defect rate of 5% within a year, one in 20 people will have to replace their console within one year. That's nothing out of the ordinary. However, the probability of killing 11 consoles, given the same hardware defect rate, is about 0.05^11 (not quite, since you don't start out with all 11 consoles, so consoles you get later have less time to break within the same first year). In other words, only one in about 204,800,104,857,653 persons will have to replace 11 consoles. Microsoft has, however, only sold about 10'000'000 consoles
What does this tell us? Either this guy is doing something wrong, or Microsoft's hardware defect rate must be way above 5% per year.