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Xbox 360 Failure Rate Is 54.2%
Colonel Korn writes "The Seattle PI Blog is reporting that a soon to be published Game Informer survey finally shows the failure rate of XBOX 360s: 54%! The survey also shows the rates of failure for the PS3 (11%) and Wii (7%). Impressively, only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures."
"According to the print edition of Game Informer, 5,000 surveyed people said the XBox 360 fails over half the time. The same survey found failure rates of 10.6% for Sony's PS3 and 6.8% on Nintendo's Wii. Microsoft trounced the competition with over five times the next highest failure rate. The article also notes that the survey revealed a skew to the numbers as the Xbox's were the most used consoles: 'Results said 40.3 percent of 360 owners use the console three to five hours a day, compared to 37 percent of PS3 owners. Meanwhile, the plurality of Wii owners (41.4 percent) play their consoles less than an hour a day.' Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox (due to failures) and the survey found they had rather shoddy customer service."
So it should be noted that a potential skew is that from the surveyed five thousand, Xbox users play their console more than Wii or PS3 users. While this certainly wouldn't explain the skewed percentages, it indicates the consoles are in higher use causing potentially more wear and tear.
But yeah, bad indicator for Microsoft and this new information actually caused me to wait to buy an Xbox 360 at the new reduced price. I think the 3.8% figure of repeat business is a good indicator that a lot of people agree.
Off-topic musing: It's interesting this Game Informer dead tree article has such virtual world implications yet the original source chose for it to be only released in their print edition and not on their site. Has GI always done this? An indication of things to come or a death knell for its readership?
My work here is dung.
From the Article:
"Just 3.8 percent of respondents said they wouldn't buy another Xbox because of system failures, according to Game Informer. And 36.4 percent of people who had an Xbox 360 fail have purchased more than one Xbox."
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
You fail at reading comprehension. These two statements:
"Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox"
"Impressively, only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures."
..mean the opposite of each other. It's not about 3.8% vs 4%, it's about whether the 4% of people would or would not buy another console.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Xbox 360s are manufactured and tested by Flextronics at their plant in Guad Mexico, known as Flex-Guad.
It is not the fault of Flex that these units fail, it is the poor design that went into them and Flex doesn't care because they are only paid to build it.
Flex runs many different products through their assembly lines for Cisco, Nintendo, Motorola, Avaya, etc and from TFA, other competitors to Microsoft don't suffer failures.
Xboxs are flawed in so many ways:
1) Restricted airflow over heatsinks using air dams
2) Awful heatsink design and little or no thermal paste between Asic and sink
3) The Asic they use are exposed die with no heat spreader
4) Microsoft tried to design their own GPU and processor themselves and failed miserably and hired a 3rd party to correct it
5) Use of lead free solder on their BGAs (very brittle and prone to low yields)
It is no surprise that many units fail due to excessive playing because the 2 main chips heat up to the point of warping the circuit board itself because it is very thin (cost cutting measure).
Microsoft placed the two hottest chips near the center of the board and it warps due to heat. The solder balls crack when the board warps and you get those lovely E74 failures. Turn it off, let it cool and it works for a bit until it warps again.
That x-clamp strategy used on the heatsinks was wrong to begin with. The newer generation Xboxs use solid bolts instead of these locking pins. If you have ever opened an Xbox you will notice those very LARGE capacitors littering the board which are prone to failure with the heat. I have myself repaired Xboxes and can tell you those caps do not survive the removal process for CPU and GPU.
If you are a PCB designer and get a chance to see the XBox circuit board, you can see that Microsoft really didn't build a proper board. They hired a team of monkeys to cobble together the Xbox and tried to fix thier mistakes 3 board revisions later. Nintendo however, built a really nice board for low cost using proper design practices.
Yeah but servers that run unfailingly for years cost more than $300, and have higher quality parts. In addition, they are most frequenly kept in temperature controlled server rooms.
The Xbox's on the other hand, are often crammed in dusty cabinets with no ventilation. I'm sure if they were to charge $1000 for a game console, they could make one that would run for years in such an environment. But people aren't going to buy it.
My Xbox360 sits on top of an open glass stereo rack, so ventilation is not a problem. The Xbox is running probably 2-6 hrs a day [weedkays]. It is our game console [The Wii doesn't get played much], it is our DVD/HDDVD player, and it is our media center front-end; playing recorded HD television, locally streamed videos [Xvid ripped DVDs], and Hulu/Netflix streaming .
One of my friends has a PS3. It gets maybe 1-2 hours per week of usage when they play some games on the weekend. Of course it is going to last longer, they never use it! :)
The Xbox360 did get a RROD. Microsoft replaced it quickly and with no hassle, and the refurb unit we got back has been running like a champ, in spite of the heavy work-load.
Nothing to see here
Retailers only see a very small percentage of the problem. Most issues happen over 6 months after the console is purchased. At that point, it is too late to return it to the store, and you have to ship it to Microsoft for repairs.
According to this 5000 respondent survey the failure rate is 54.2%, but the article points out that over 30 million consoles have been sold. I would place little confidence in the 5000 person survey.
Actually, with a population of 30 million, you can be 99% confident of the result with a confidence interval of +-2% with a sample size of 4,160. Check these numbers here. This means you know with 99% confidence that the actual population failure rate is between 52.2% and 56.2%. Sample sizes don't need to be as large as most people think to produce statistically significant results. Of course, that calculation assumes a random sample from the population, whereas this was sampled only from readers of Game Informer. I could see an argument that the numbers are skewed by selection bias, but the sample size is large enough.
Xboxe 360s that were manufactured in the latter part of 2008(Falcon and Jasper revisions, I believe) should be fine. Newer models have dealt with the heatsink design flaw that killed so many of the older revisions. On the older models, as the internal temprature of the unit increased, the heatsink would pull away from the GPU and then the GPU would fry, causing the RROD. The chances of a newer model failing are very slim in comparison. That being said, I usually purchase multi-platform titles for my PS3, as part of me has nagging doubts about the 360. After my first 360 went tits up, I swore I wouldn't buy another one, but the JRPGS on the 360 were too tempting for me to pass up. The 360 is an outstanding platform in terms of software, but man does the hardware QA suck.
it was in local news.... _LOCAL NEWS_ in the NYC metro area in 2007... thats 2 full years ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/technology/13iht-13halo.7093255.html
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
"A.) Not quite 2/3 of people never have a problem with thier 360. Of the unfortunate 39% who do ...",
Your maths are still way off. 2/3 + 39% ~ 106%. 2/3 is not the same as 61% and it seems like your extremely inaccurate "rounding" to 2/3 is to trivialise the problem.
Also 39% is still an extremely high rate. It means that if you and four other friends buy an X-Box it is only around 8.5% chance that none of you will have an error. This is rather unheard of. You might as well use "fortunate" to describe the people that DON'T have hardware failures.
"B.) True, the warranty is only good for 3 years, but that's three times better than the PS3's and the Wii's one year warranty. That's right, one year and you're out of luck for the competition."
This was only to avoid loads of class action lawsuits and the 3 year warranty only covers a known design flaw in the XBox.
"So, PS3 for $300, or XBOX 360 for $250? Which is cheaper again?"
First, the XBox 360 Pro is $299. Buying the arcade and separate hard drive means you don't get component HD cables and you don't get the head set. Also if you play online you need to purchase the XBox live membership for $45 a year (online play is free on the PS3). Meaning over a year, the XBox is now the most expensive of these two consoles.
"Which has more games, including all of the best ones? Thought so."
I own an XBox 360, which I'm so far happy with. I am the only one among three friends who has yet to have a hardware problem.
You really are trying very hard to defend the inexcusable here. That is the true mark of a fanboy.