Inside Source Reveal the Truth About Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" Failures

[rounds1]

Originally Posted by Fyrus

I guess that's fair, but I'm pretty sure almost all the people on this site had a PS2.

Not I, said the fly! I had friends with PS2's, so I played theirs and then got an XBOX when it came out.

[Fyrus]

Originally Posted by rounds1

Not I, said the fly! I had friends with PS2's, so I played theirs and then got an XBOX when it came out.

Almost all I said.

[Power666]

Originally Posted by chedabob

I'd rather have a failure in warranty that won't cost me anything to fix, than a failure out of warranty that will cost a lot to replace/fix.

The catch here is that both the Xbox 360 and the PS2 use moving parts - failure is 100% guranteed over a large enough time line. While it is very shoddy for the PS2 to develop disk read errors after a few years on average, it did take some time for them to appear.

Sure, getting something replaced for free under warranty is nice but remember what I said - things with moving parts are destined to fail. The disk read errors took long enough to develop that people were actually able to get some use out of those systems before they finally did fail. Getting stuff replaced under warranty should be an exception rather than a rule. With a 30% failure rate, the RRoD is akin to a rule rather than an exception for many.

Also remember that MS extended the warranty more as means to blanket themselves from a class action lawsuit than as a courtesy to the consumer. The $1.1 billion allocated for the warranty extension is less than what they calculated they'd lose in such a lawsuit.

[Fyrus]

My Xbox is till working fine after 3 years. My PS2 died at 1 and a half, and I DIDN'T GET ANYTHING FOR IT. My monitor on my computer recently broke. I called Dell they gave me a knew one for free, AFTER 3 years of having my old monitor. I've made the same point over and over again.

[Romanc]

Originally Posted by Article source

In the end I think it was fear of failure, ambition to beat Sony, and the arrogance that they could figure anything out, that led to the decision to keep shipping. That management team had made some pretty bad decisions in the past and had never had to pay a proportional consequence. I'm sure they thought that somehow they would figure it out and everything would end up ok.

This seems like how Microsoft operates in the software market; ship with bugs, then send out bugfixes. Too bad hardware/design bugs are not easily circumvented.

[rounds1]

Sony sucks, plain and simple. They make you buy all Sony crap with their proprietary nonsense and then the stuff breaks on you and they don't wanna know nothin'.

[Fyrus]

I've gotten a bit fonder of sony since a couple months ago, but still it doesn't erase their past.

[X51]

There are a couple of other things to consider in this argument. Microsoft can still be considered new at hardware design in general. While the original Xbox design was very reliable, it's not outside the realm of possibility that it was by fortune, on top of which they were working with simpler technology.

There is another reason they had to rush release of the console, and that was the impending death of the first Xbox due to Nvidia's ceasing of production of the Xbox GPUs. Microsoft had to launch early, or face a year without an actively supported console on the market.

[Romanc]

Originally Posted by X51

There are a couple of other things to consider in this argument. Microsoft can still be considered new at hardware design in general. While the original Xbox design was very reliable, it's not outside the realm of possibility that it was by fortune, on top of which they were working with simpler technology.

There is another reason they had to rush release of the console, and that was the impending death of the first Xbox due to Nvidia's ceasing of production of the Xbox GPUs. Microsoft had to launch early, or face a year without an actively supported console on the market.

I mostly agree with this, except I don't really think the reliability of the original XBOX had anything to do with luck. I think this was because they used a trusted reliable design; that of a standard (underpowered) PC with a gimped version of Windows on top.

[PirateThom]

Microsoft didn't even design the 360 (or the Xbox), it was two outside companies, Astro Studios along with Hers Experimental Design Laboratory.

Microsoft should really sue them.