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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.
Where the hell is he playing with these systems, the tub?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
In fact, I have proof: http://slashdot.org/~Stickerboy/friends/
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
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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
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.
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.
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.
Ah, see 3% with a grain of salt. 3% DOA would be ridiculous, I agree, but 3% failing within a year? Or 3% failing after 2,880 hours of use (4 whole months of play time)? It's hard to say.
Then you've got to count all the possible failures. Harddrive failure rates are around 2-4% according to some surveys, so that could account for the whole thing by itself (even though it doesn't). Laptops, as a more mobile platform, are between 15 and 20% likely to crap out on a yearly basis, according to a Gartner press release from last year...Same release put desktop failure rates at around 5% in the first year. Compared to those rates 3% looks godlike.
But there's just not enough data.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Related joke follows; corollary follows joke.
Q: Why doesn't Mexico compete in the olympic triathlon?
A: Because everyone who can run, bike, or swim is in the US.
Corollary: Maybe he's in a wheelchair :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh and he claims his dad is an electrician AND he has hired an independant contractor to look at the wiring. Also he claims to have not had these same issues with his other systems (and he claims to have several.)
TFA is quite good. There's even an mp3 of a call to MS...
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.
I've had my 360 replaced 3 times. It is not abused. I keep it in a well ventilated area, and I don't have issues with power problems damaging any of my other electronic equipment. I have a friend that has had his 360 replaced 5 times. His is kept in a well ventilated area and is actually plugged into a power conditioner. I also have other friends who have never had any issues with their 360. I think the real problem lies in the return process. When your 360 breaks, you call Microsoft and they ship you a box to mail the 360 back to them in. You are not to ship the power supply, cables, controller, etc. When they recieve it, they ship you a different refurbished console. My guess is one of the following is happening: 1. They aren't doing a good job at repairing units. Either early revisions of the 360 have some defects in the hardware design that make them more prone to failure, or their repair process isn't catching all the defects, or both. Either way, these bad units just keep getting cycled through the return process. 2. Parts of the 360 that are not to be shipped back are defective and cause hardware failures in the console. For example, a problem with the external DC power supply could cause a hardware failure in the console. You ship the console back and they give you a repaired console. You then plug the refurbished console into the defective power brick and damage that one too. I now have a stable console that has lasted several months, so I don't expect any more problems. My friend who just had his console replaced again about a month ago told me that Microsoft's new policy is to repair the console you send them and ship you back the same console. Once the same console has been repaired 3 times, they send you a new console. So obviously Microsoft is aware of the problem in their return process and is doing something to address it.
What I found is that UPS employees seem to treat different parties' boxes very differently. I've received countless shipments from online stores that were pristine - it was obvious that they weren't subject to even the slightest shock in transit. Then there were a few from smaller merchants that were a little beat up, but never seriously. And then there were personal shipments that I or my friends had sent - and those were almost always beat up, corners crushed in, sides bent, and contents damaged.
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You're confused.
.5^11, or dramatically lower than .5. The naive odds of any one 360 failing in a given timespan will be x, where x is apparently .03--the 11th 360 ostensibly has the same .03 odds, but the odds of getting 11 failures in a row will be .03^11.
The odds of getting heads on the eleventh toss of a fair coin is 50% just like the first, but that's not what the grandparent is talking about. The odds of getting eleven heads in a row is indeed
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".
I worked at UPS for a spell. Every box was thrown. Some boxes were called "wedges" used to keep a wall of boxes from falling down. I got really good at it. Seriously, your shipped box WILL get thrown. I only fault UPS for not telling customers to pack and tape the crap out of their boxes. Some people don't know how to do that. My friend once worked at FexEx. The attitude there was like, "well, if the packages is insured, then it is okay to break it, because insurance will cover it. If it is not insured, then it's nothing of value."
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?
...If you manufacture 10 items and 1 item is a lemon you have a 1% defect rate...
That's in American Public Schools. In other parts of the world, we're pretty much agreed on 10%.
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.