Supposed MS insider discusses RRoD errors, Falcon at 10% failure rate?

perhaps, or electronics have become much more complex and consumers demand more for less money. difficult to say really.

 

I think if MS knowingly sell XBOX360 that have such a low reliability, then it's just plain wrong. And instead of a recall, they get away with 3 years warranty. What happen if the console broke down because of the RROD after the 3 years warranty? Can MS or anyone say convincingly that if the console doesn't have the RROD within 3 years, then it would be safe from this problem? I'm pretty sure that the normal wear and tear for such component that failed because of the RROD problem probably exceeds 3 years. And wouldn't it be better if all the console that were potentially have RROD problem failed early? Because the longer the console could tolerate the RROD problem, the more strain the component is receiving and potentially could cause and even bigger problem.

And I believe MS never disclosed the real cause of the RROD problem. IIRC, they only acknowledge that there is a problem with the XBOX360 that would cause it to go RROD. They never really give the failure rate, and even said that it's within the industry standard.

From my pov, MS this time have successfully 'cheat' their way to become the no.2 console.. (damn the Wii... )

 

A bigger problem then the RROD? WTF are you talking about? System failure is about as bad as it gets unless you think they are actually going to cause a nuclear meltdown or something ridiculous. No they can't say for sure the unit will never fail, just like Sony can't say the ps3 will never fail after 1yr.

As for a recall, that would have been about the most boneheaded move in history. There's 2 reasons to do a recall from a business perspective, public safety and cost. Clearly public safety isn't an issue, and obviously the cost to repair is less than the cost of a recall (which is to say less than the cost of marketing suicide). Thus the only reason MS would have issued a recall would have been that they were complete morons.

 

The thing is they did not take action, they knew there were problems, they ignored them for profit. Only when it grow so big and they had to many stories of 5-6-7-8-9-10 and 14? failures for the same persons their PR spins just couldn´t hold water any more and they had to invest in order to save their sales.

And maybe we should also drag cars and their recalls into this RROD 360 thread, or maybe just start new ones if anyone wants to discuss iPOD , PS1 and laptop batteries.

My point with:

Was not that other products doesn´t fail, but the backlash just didnt fit the failure rates.

 

No , do you have failure rates of the xbox 360 (and not speculation) ?

MS offered a warrenty to all those who had the rrod and refunded those who previously payed out of pocket. Not everyone had problems unlike the batterys in which all of them could have exploded. I had a launch unit untill I bought the 60 gig one in july. IT never failed once. Why would MS need to recall it.

are todays electronics more complex for their time than electronics 10 or 20 years ago ? I don't know about that

Wasn't there a class action lawsuit against sony to acknowledge the failures of the ps2 and stop charging people for fixing common issues on the first year or so of system releases ? The ps2 had a huge amount of problems with its dvd drive and they continued to charge for the first 2 years or so of its life.

Once MS acted it did so without a lawsuit .

As for storys of people on 15 or so systems , how about those like myself who had a launch unit that never failed ? How about the countless ones that never once had a problem.

Why can't we talk bout other products with high failure rates. Why are we just focusing on the xbox as if it exists in a vaccum ?

How so ? The failures of the ps1 and ps2 didn't seem to harm them long term , the famous issues with the nes (blow in the cart and pray to god it works) didn't affect its sucess. The ipod battery problems didn't stop it from becoming the best selling dap.

Today recalls and problems with hardware and software are just a part of life , you brought up cars but if you go on a site and search for recalls they are very common , there are very few if any cars that do not have a recall for something inside the car.

 

Once they acted they did it before the lawsuit, and your post is kind a proving my point isn´t it. You don´t seem acknowledge ANY wrong doing on Microsofts part.

And you can´t stop bringing up the PS2 and batteries, and even cars

 

It would do you good to read the entire 6 page article that Dean Takahashi wrote, it cover those questions you are asking, however I don't understand where you get exploding batteries in a console forum or comparison.

I also do not understand your logic in saying your launch Xbox 360 never failed yet you purchased an additional unit in July of this year. If your console proved to be robust already, assuming you never modified it by breaking the warranty seal then there was no point in having an additional one to replace it.

DVD drive issues/problems are completely different from a overheating GPU, poor heatsink application that results in the console's motherboard becoming junk.

I am sure that prices for repairs would reveal the difference but you can also take a guess

That said as a first gen DVD console, the PS2 did have its problems however not all console's DVD drives failed since there are many launch PS2s, including Japanese consoles from early 2000 in full working order, in comparison the DVD drives in Microsoft's XBox 1 also failed to read game discs and DVD movies until Microsoft eventually resolved those issues 2 years after launch, even the article makes a reference to this.

How do we know that there was never a lawsuit against MS for failing consoles?

Read the threat title and the articles by Dean Takahashi, the man who previously wrote a book on Microsoft XBox 1, called Opening the XBox, he was going to write a book on XBox 360 reguardless of the DVD scratching failiures and RRoD failiures and the fiasco that resulted.

No sir, that makes no sense, you just don't sell a poorly made product that fails numerous times and then compare it to different problems on other products that are years appart.

 

Once again the 360 issues do not exist in a vacuum. Other products have had similar problems and failure rates and we have many diffrent ways of dealing with them. Is ms's way the best way ? Mabye not but its been in line with or even better than other companys and the way they handled similar things in the past.

I bought a new unit for the newer hardrive and the hdmi connector. There were no problems with my older 360 and the person who has taken it from me has yet to experiance any problems. I could not get hdmi on my old system and at the time the only option was a 120 gig drive at $170. I figured for another $170 or so I could simply get the new system and get hdmi.

A drive issue rendering the platform a piece of junk due to a poor dvd drive is diffrent than the gpu junking a machine ? Isn't the end result for a customer a non usable system in both cases ?

And isn't there also many working launch xbox 360 units still floating around out there?

how is the situation different ?

Lawsuits are public domain and we would have easily heard of someone filing a lawsuit against microsoft about this issue.

He wrote a book on the xbox 360 , i own it , its a good read. I still don't understand why there is discusion on how ms handled the situation as if it existed in a vaccum and there aren't dozens of other examples of other companys doing the same things sometimes better and sometimes worse. As soon as we started discusing how ms handled this we opened it up for comparions to other companys and products becuase if we didn't compare we would never know how bad ms did with this and how much or how little the customer got screwed in the end.

I don't see how your thought process makes sense here. Your acting like the 360 is the only poorly made product that has ever failed in higher than industry averages. After all its just an average and if its at 3-5% that means someone is failing much more than that 3-5%.

Apple had a poorly madep roduct in the ipod , sony with the ps1 and ps2 at hte start of their life cycle , nintendo had the same with the original nes.

What is important is not that the product was poor but that all these companys were able to move past the initial poor product through either better user experiances with the hardware / software or just having nothing else to go up against it.

Not only was MS repairing consoles while this was all going down and eventualy extended the rrod warrenty to 3 years . But they were also compensating people with free games , controller , acessorys and xbox live time. Now with newer revisions the likely hood of your 360 failing is in line with the ps3 failure rates.

At the end of the generation will anyone but ms haters care about the rrod problems ? Will hardcore early adopters who had rrod problems pass on the xbox next when it comes out ?

 

When it comes to consoles i think Microsoft have outdone all the other console makers with their way of handling the RROD failures. When someone recieves their 3rd defect console something is very wrong, when it´s the 6th it borders on pissing people in the face, i cant put the words here on the 10th.

They knew they were shipping a faulty product, they knew their tests weren´t solid, but they did it because "they had to". They replaced , knowingly, bad consoles with bad consoles.

They could have extended the warranty way earlier, and reading other forums i can see there is still issues with people getting their consoles repaired for free.

And you think they did great.

And since you keep the PS1 and PS2 in this thread, in europe there werent any big issues with those because the warranty lasted 1 year back then (2 years now), so i cant really comment on that, i sold them back then and had very little negative feedback on them.

There is a risk of the batteries exploding and sony lost millions replacing them, they didnt ignore the problem for 18 months.

And you forgot the original XBOX fires where MS had to send out new PSU´s

 

They were power plugs with a breaker switch. The PSU was internal.

 

I don't think they did great, but then again I don't think they should be crucified like it seems you want them to. Personally, I can understand their unwillingness to do a safety recall. The problem didn't create an unsafe product: just a defective one. They had already extended the warranty from 90 days to 1 year and that was retro for launch systems too. Later on when they finally took the $1billion charge for the RROD they extended the warranty to 3 years, not just the current ones, but also the launch systems and future systems. Ballsy move if you ask me. Yes, there were customers that had issues with multiple systems and that's unfortunate. But I feel that considering the options, it was sufficient one for them and their customers. Some of them might not agree, but they would probably be a vocal minority as evidenced by the system's continued sales.

They didn't replace PSUs, they replaced the power cords. Supposedly only 14,000 of the 14 million recalled were affected. I had 2 recall units and sent off for one of the free cords. Never had a problem with either unit and I still have one of them.

Tommy McClain

 

Not crucified that accomplishes nothing.

 

Oh, ok. So just continued berating ad infinitum? Gotcha.

Tommy McClain

 

There's a big difference between crucifying and, as eastmen is doing, acting like there was hardly any problem to begin with. MS handled the whole thing badly from the point of view of a consumer, and I really hope that next-gen they behave differently. The fact that other products have had failures doesn't change the fact, and bringing it up just serves to mask the issue.

 

I'm sorry . Do you want me to start making some torches and we can all storm microsofts head quarters in redmond washington ?

Is that what you guys want.

The console was screwed up and ms admited to it and is replacing them for up to 3 years. They even went above and beyond by giving free games and other things to those badly effected.


When my buddy's xbox 360 died for the second time he was given a free 20 gig hardrive and kameo . When My ipod died I was given a bill for $50 bucks or told to go F off. I will tell you what product i'd rather buy.

 

Don't even try. That's a strawman and you know it.

Not right away they didn't. You know this, I know this, it's been stated repeatedly in this thread, it's referred to in the Dean Takahashi story.

Is the iPod competing with the Xbox 360?

 

Um, you actually _hope_ that it won't happen again? You're saying that even after Microsoft took some of the worst publicity ever for a defective console and a $1billion dollar write-off to cover such issue, that they and every other console maker didn't learn a lesson and are destined to do it again? Whatever. They and everybody else got the picture loud and clear.

Tommy McClain

 

behave? you act like they purposely tried to cut corners to deceive. they brought out a unit a bit prematurely that was cutting edge, (unified shaders, dodgey memory) that produces the same graphics as a machine released a year later, virtually unheard of in this industry.

some unforeseeable errors were inevitable under those circumstances which is why they stepped up to the plate, made good on the bad ones and corrected the problem in future versions ASAP.

 

They gave games and other things since the begining. My friend had to return his xbox 360 7 months into its life. He recieved kameo.

As for the ipod and xbox 360 whats it matter ? They are both products and both had issue. The xbox 360 problems were handled better than previous other consoles in the past. They are the same market and thus are comparable. The nes , ps1 , ps2 are all comparable and had similar situations.

The thing is the only people who will bitch about it are people who are anti ms. I know many people who had rrod issues and all of them are quite happy with the service ms provided it in replacing it. Even my friend who holds the record of 3 returns so far. On the third return they sent him a new console and he hasn't had problems in over a year.

 

Did you read Dean Takahashi's article? The whole point is that they knew about problems all along, and denied them until they just couldn't anymore, and only then did they do the right thing. People have known this for a while; people's response to the latest article is even 'old news' -- no one is denying it.