Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
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.
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.