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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."
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.
Whoa, horsie! You've got that backwards.
So even though only 37.7% found the customer service 'very helpful' (how many found it to be 'helpful'?), 96.2% still would buy another XBox.
That said, these are also lifetime numbers. I would be very surprised if the failure rate of the remaining consoles in households is still 50%, or even anywhere close.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Note the giant typo in the slashdot summary versus eldavojohn's (emphasis added). From Slashdot:
only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures.
From eldavojohn
only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox
This is a pretty significant difference, and owing to Slashdot's frequent editorial errors, I'd say trust eldavojohn.
Or you could RTFA! My summary is correct.
"Regardless of everything above, people still love their Xbox 360s. 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."
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I would be willing to be even more than 300 on average. Rockband and a couple of other games plus extra controllers puts you easily above that mark.
The Wii is the worst though. The first day of owning a Wii you end up spending more on controllers and games than the console cost.
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
They also then extended the warranty to 10 years. I have had one replaced, and it was the easiest thing I have ever done. I called them, they sent me a box, I put my 360 in the box and shipped it back. Two weeks later...new XBox! Total cost: about $4.00 for the phone call to claim the warranty, no questions asked.
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
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.
Not true! They will only send you a refurbished Xbox 360 if yours RRoD's (and ONLY RRoD's) within 3 years of purchase, 1 year for all other problems. They changed their repair policy to exclude anything not RRoD from the 3 year warranty. If you think this doesn't affect anything, you should look into the growing number of DVD drive failures that 360's are experiencing.
My last refurbished console I received had a broken DVD drive out of the box, but I have to pay to have it fixed. I'm stuck helping the drive door open and close. I also periodically get disk wobble that scratches the disks and causes games to have "disk read errors" during games with a lot of disk access. Luckily, the ability to rip games to the HD have helped work around the second issue, but it'd be nice to not have to manually pull the drive tray out to change games.
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.
I have had one replaced, and it was the easiest thing I have ever done.
Unless your life in unimaginably suckish or you have severe OCD, I have a hard time believing that's the easiest thing you've ever done.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The difference between PC software and console software is that console software is tailored EXTREMELY closely to the hardware. Just getting another machine to run the same OS won't cut it. Even changing the speed at which the discs load can completely break a game and render it unplayable.
Using the Playstation as an example, Even the PS2 couldn't run all Ps1 games 100% and that had Ps1 hardware IN it, and was (roughly) 10x more powerful. Original PS3's couldn't run all PS2 games 100% either, and they had copies of the PS2 CPU and GPU inside them. Current PS3's cut the parts for cost reasons, and can't run PS2 software at all. And this is SONY trying to get their own software working on vastly more powerful machines.
And emulators? Forget about it. PCSX2 is the best PS2 emulator available, and you need at least dual core processor running at 3.0+ ghz to attempt to run anything at a decent speed, and it STILL chokes on games like Shadow of the Colossus and MGS3. Keep in mind the PS2 is a ten year old console with a 300mhz processor.
So as you can see, Current PCs don't have a prayer of running current console software for a billion reasons, some of which are technical but not all of them.