Rikimaru
Veteran
Original xbox one design exist 2 years already. It's a very long life for consumer electronics.How much effort do you think they should put into a product with a limited production life? And where do you think they should concentrate on that effort. The original sku may be on retail shelves for 2-3 years but are meant to have a lifetime that spans beyond their generation.
My thought is MS studied the sales and usage data of the 360 and realized there is a significant impact on sales and user retention when consoles die early on consumers. No company wants to lose loyal consumers because their products don't last. And having loyal consumers spend hundreds of dollars to replace defective or broken consoles is a waste. Because those customers are spending hundreds of dollars on a low margin product instead of high margin and more lucrative products like games, services or accessories.
I think they also accounted for the workload of the Xbox one. Its voice control and HDMI in means that a portion of its hardware may be always active when the TV is in use. Plus there isn't any historical usage data on MS approach for the Xb1. So, designing its new gen console to be quieter as well more reliable and longer lasting while possibly enduring more use over that time probably spurred a more conservative approach where size is less of a priority.
In the hey day of Nintendo where the bulk of product sales were seen with the original form factor, producing a robust initial small design made sense. Today where Slim version are expected 2-3 years after launch and the potential of most of sales coming after that change in the form factor, there is no point in highly prioritizing size anymore.
They should have made it better. MS literally shipped 3 bricks in the box each with own fan. And a lot of PSU's make noise in standby. There also was a widespread coil noise issue after first cost reduction.
Well of course they were afraid of RROD fiasco but still.
PS4 reliability is not worse than xbox one despite using more power (original CUH-1000), being smaller and having PSU inside.