Slashdot Mirror
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."
I am on my second PS3 after the first had a firmware update which is claimed completed. Went to reboot and the system just hangs. Ended up sending it back to Sony and the shipped me a different one. So even though it wasn't a hardware issue, things happen.
No problems with the Wii yet, runs like a champ.
Other than all being Xbox360s, what else do they all have in common? Perhaps they all came from the same retailer which has a stockboy that liked to drop-kick the Xboxes? Or, perhaps, he has some seriously bad karma.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
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.
Where the hell is he playing with these systems, the tub?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Vocal Minority my ball sack.
I had the three blinking red lights (first example voice prompt on the 360 support line!), and they proceeded to lose my freakin' Xbox. After two weeks of "here's your reference number, call back in a few days" I finally got a voicemail saying that they have the shipping reference . . . but they didn't, you know, leave the fucking reference number.
They sure seem overwhelmed given that they claim to have a below-industry-standard failure rate.
-Peter
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.
I buy my consoles at Sam's Club or Wal-Mart. Broken 360? Drive to the store and exchange it. Not happy about getting 5th broken 360? Drive to the store and get my money back. No waiting for Microsoft to ship a working unit. No worrying about receiving a refurbished unit to replace the broken one (Some companies do this. Not sure about Microsoft). I personally came to this epiphany when people were discussing PSP dead pixel policies at several different retailers. People who bought from Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Costco or Target just took them back for exchange/refund. Costco is too far away and Target usually has a shorter return window so I'll go to Wal-Mart or Sam's.
In fact, I have proof: http://slashdot.org/~Stickerboy/friends/
Not that anyone would really want to buy the sickly animals from a major pet store retailer, that promotes the often times cruel breeding practices used to supply purse dogs and such...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Damn, wish I had modpoints on this story.
I troubleshoot home theater electronics all day, every day. I have to wonder if something else is at work here. At least one person asked, what do these eleven units all have in common? The same working environment. There are plenty of Xbox 360s out there, and they certainly all aren't failures, and the chance that this one person has received every part from the 1-2% of doomed 360s out there that are failures would be nearly statistically impossible.
More likely is that some other factor is causing this, perhaps the powerstrip he's plugged it into has a badly grounded outlet, or perhaps the main outlet itself - or possibly any of another hundred or so electrical issues there could be - such issues tend to plague complex electronics in very odd ways, and not the same way every time.
If I were at Microsoft, I'd replace his unit, but advise this guy he needs to get some help looking for what other factors could be causing these malfunctions.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
The simple math you ask is (0.05)^11, which is about a 1 out of 205 trillion probablility (or rather a huge improbability). To start having a more down-to-earth probability you would have to assume a huge 20% failure rate to bring the probablility down to 1 in 50 million. A 20% failure rate of course would not have gone by unnoticed and MS would certainly not have been able to dispute it.
So, unless this guy is driving the Heart Of Gold, there is something else going on here.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
This isn't the hate-filled microsoft bashing I came here to read, damnit.
I used to work at Western Digital in their support area and we saw the same thing happen to a tiny minority of users. I'm not excusing Microsoft for it, but for some reason it seems to happen to every company. We'd have someone have a head crash, 2 DOA's, 1 week working then dead, etc. It was strange but there was really nothing we could do about it. 99% of our replacement orders went out and worked flawlessly with no hiccups in the process but for whatever reason there's a certain percentage that are doomed for multiple failures.
The real tragedy here is that Microsoft management didn't catch this case long before this and flag it as a priority fix case - send him a new machine, have someone deliver it to his house, whatever it takes to get the problem fixed. The cost of doing that is FAR less than the cost of fixing the amount of bad publicity this will generate.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
It will be a vacuum cleaner.
Odds of getting 11 Failed XBox360s given a 5% failure rate: 1 in 20^11 or 204,800,000,000,000 (204 Trillion). If we assume a 10% failure rate we have 1 in 10^11 or 10,000,000,000 (10 Billion). Given that there are only about 12 Million units sold, and assuming that this guy was the least lucky person, but there were no enviromental hazards killing his 360s (which is a dangerous assumption), We can estimate a failure rate of about 23%. The error rate and confidence ranges will need to wait until another post.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Quote that may help him "The only consistent feature of your dissatisfying relationships is you." What else in your life do you break, buddy-pal-friend-o-mine?
That's a one in 3,200,000 chance.
The OP's is a one in 100,000,000,000 - and that's assuming a truly massive failure rate of 10% globally. If you assume a 5% failure rate, the chance plummets to one in 204,800,000,000,000. That's one in 204 trillion.
There's clearly some common factor here, whether it's the UPS delivery man or keeping the XBox and its power supply under an overturned cardboard box while running.
Perhaps even purposefully. I can definitely see the motivation to go through so many XBox units as to get your name on the front page of Digg, Slashdot, and 1up.
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.
Indeed. When I borrowed my friend's 360 for a week, every time I would remove the DVD from the drive, it would actually be hot to the touch. Not enough to burn me, but enough that I didn't much like holding it, even by the edges. I bought one of those shitty fans for the back, then threw that away and rigged up a system to blow air by the system to help the fan a bit. (Helps my Wii, too, which gets stupidly hot while it's off.)
It's disgustingly easy to overheat a 360, especially if you put it in -any- enclosed space, or too near it's power brick.
The fact that most people don't do 1 of the 2 is some God-given miracle, I think.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Although it's not "over"heating, and I haven't had any actual problems yet, does anybody else find that their Wii gets quite hot when you leave it in standby mode, with WiiConnect 24 turned on. I've only had my Wii about a month, but I really think sometimes that I should turn off the WiiConnect 24 because of how hot it gets, and I don't want the heat to get to it after a year and a half, meaning I'll have to buy another one. I really think they should leave the fan on. Or at least have it run intermittently. It's not like it's actually loud enough to hear.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well... He's got a friend now.
(ignoring the "RMA pool effect" which makes you more likely to get a bad unit back)
I know you were looking for theoretical numbers that excluded this, but keep in mind that this is likely a high source of failure for this guy. Of his 11 failed XBox 360s, he received new ones some of the time, but some of them (maybe half? from when I RTFA) were refurbished.
Reasons why refurbished products might have a lower MTBF:
1. Failure was just a symptom of a larger problem. Like, the solder paste used to build the PCB was a little dry, so the paste did not apply evenly or reflow correctly. The original return was for pins with clearly broken/poor solder joints, which were hand retouched. The person who receives the refurbished unit has to deal with all the other solder joints, which might be more susceptible to damage over time and with jolts and vibrations.
2. As another example of the failure being the symptom, perhaps a component in the power supply has an intermittent failure (like a damaged capacitor). When it fails, the voltage rail can temporarily spike. The original owner RMAd the unit for burnt ICs. I would hope Microsoft RMA would trace the root cause, but if they can't reproduce the intermittent failure they might not see it. The next owner could have the box fail in the same way.
3. Even if there was just one failure, and RMA fixed it, applying heat to a PCB always causes internal structural changes. Most PCBs go through two heat cycles (for top and bottom components). Each additional heat cycle wears on the board. After some number of cycles (assume 6 or 7 at best), the layers of the PCB will start to delaminate and there can be internal breaks on traces and vias. Microsoft RMA repaired the original bad chip, but the board was slightly overheated and the PCB separated. The second owner could find vias more susceptible to breaking with light shocks or vibration.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
Puppy mills are a large problem, but at least at the PetSmart locations in the D.C. area they don't sell cats or dogs. They do have cats from local shelters there for adoption, though. There's a fee, but AFAIK this goes to the group running the shelter not anyone who bred the dogs.
There are, however, many other pet stores that do sell dogs from puppy mills. Also, I've gotten fish from PetSmart that had ick, so I'm hardly saying that all their animals are healthy or well taken care of.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Get this guy an Exorcist.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
He's not getting a brand new 360 each time he sends them back. He's getting a refurb at best.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
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.
They say that when you return 13 XBox 360's, Bill Gates comes to your house and personally pisses on your shoe.
Frankly, I'm not too surprised of his luck considering that MS sends out refurbished machines as replacements. I normally used to think that refurbished electronics were a safe way to save some money, and often times had a few spanking new parts making them more reliable that some alternatives.
Then a friend of mine bought a refurbished xbox (not a 360 though). Thing crapped out. As did it's replacement. And the one after that. After the 3rd, he just gave up, took a refund, and went to the store to buy a new unit. No problems since.
We ended up deciding that MS must not really be doing comprehensive quality control on it's rebuilds, and that they're only fixing the most easily spotted problem on returned units (if that much) and not looking for deeper failures.
I don't trust the refurbished xbox at all. And, honestly, I'm now a bit weary of buying any refurbished electronics.
So, for all those statisticians quoting 1 in 204 trillion odds, I think it's safer to say that a spanking new unit has that failure rate, while a refurbished unit might have a failure rate much closer to unity. If they'd bothered to send him a new unit at any point for his troubles, my bet is he'd have a much better chance at keeping the thing (and it might not help to dust!)
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
at first I thought this was impossible, but the article mentions that two of the eleven were DOA. Hard to blame DOAs on the user. With a 20% DOA rate this becomes a bit more believable. My guess is they keep sending refurb units that are just crap they get to boot up, but still can't handle real use.
yes, according to lots of LCD and plasma TVs. also some heads and groins.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Yup. That's your most likely culprit; bad replacements because they're not newly manufactured.
Apple had a similar problem: a design flaw in the iBook G3 series lead to the GPU cracking its mount on the circuit board, or the traces on the board, and leading to really neat "I never thought an LCD could look like that" video patterns. They instituted the iBook G3 Logic Board Repair Extension to cover all affected machines. (After a lawsuit... Apple gets sued a lot for bad software and hardware. Why doesn't Microsoft get sued even more? They've got more users.)
So, when you got your machine back, you most likely had a weaker board than a new machine, and the design flaw that caused the original failure was still there, but the net effect was to lower the MTBF from "year or so" to "month or so". I had one fail the day I brought the machine back home. The best replacement lasted 6 months; average was about 6 weeks. And each repair took longer and longer, from 2 weeks initially to 3-5 by the 6th board. I guess they were having trouble getting working boards in.
Finally, I had Pointed Words with the Customer Relations people at Apple and they solved the iBook G3 problem once and for all. I have never had an iBook G3 fail since then.
(There seems to be a similar thermal flaw in the iBook G4, but instead it cracks the interface to the WiFi and Bluetooth radio module.)
So, I can easily see that once you get a warranty replacement unit, you're on the downward spiral. The only exception is getting a real, new, sealed unit; only then are you back to the same base probability of failure as everyone else.
I've never owned an Xbox myself (I always figured what's the point since it's just a glorified PC in the shape of a games console)
- on-a-xbox-360/
However a certain freind of mine did a little investigation with the faulty ones he's had so far (given that he's a PC support engineer)
From the looks of things the problem appears to be a fundamental design flaw with the way the heat sink attaches to the main board
typically it attaches over a large area
once certain parts of the board heat up more than others this causes the board to flex and bend slightly
since the heatsink spans a large area, this results in certain sections underneath the heatsink cross to become drawn or pulled away from the main heatsink ever so slightly
the end result is something critical that should be in contact with the heatsink under the cross is no longer in contact, i.e. Red screen of death
http://www.hiptechblog.com/2006/10/30/cook-an-egg
And IIRC one very dead puppy.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
I don't use the straps.
My kids haven't even thrown the damn things. Maybe dropped it once, but not thrown.
And the damn wiimotes are not very heavy. It would take quite some speed to get it to break a TV.
I know it's third hand information but I regularly speak with people on a popular gaming messageboard and one of the guys there is up to seven consoles, he has no reason to lie, seriously.
He's used a UPS , Power conditioner, he's even moved house (co-incidentally) I think he's tried multiple TV's - he's pretty much eliminated all the variables and still 7 down.
He loves the games on the system and is always |_| so close to swapping to a PS3 but ultimately the games he loves are on the 360.
It's a real shame and it's why I don't own one yet myself (and dipshit Microsoft love halting the release of products in other regions! Hello, Australia want the elite too!)
Either way, that's an appauling amount of consoles to fail.
Also one of the members of this particular forum ran a 'survey' system which had about 500 or so users on there, each time one failed they incrimented the number for each user.
A large quantity of guys only had 1 console, no failures but ultimately it worked out to around a 20% failure rate according to his survey, with of course the guy with 7 dead ones at the top of the list.
Crazy stuff, I'm waiting for the 'fixed' edition! (it better come out before GTA4 goddamnit!)
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.