The Man Who Went Through 11 Xbox 360s 428
1up is carrying the sad story of Justin Lowe. Just your average gamer, wanting to partake of the current generation of consoles. He's got a PSP, DS, PS3, and a 360. He really likes his 360 ... which is probably a good thing, since he's sent 11 of them back to Microsoft. He's now on his twelfth. The piece covers Justin's ongoing plight, and discusses Microsoft's claims of hardware failures being a 'vocal minority'. "Justin has not had a working system for longer than a month or two. The list of problems is almost comically large: three red lights of death, two with disc read errors, two dead on arrival, several with random audio and video-related issues and one that actually exploded. Looking at the situation through Moore's own standards, how has Microsoft performed? 'On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate them an 8... at first,' says Lowe. His [first] 360 broke in early January, just a few weeks after purchase."
Environment (Score:5, Insightful)
All heat sink related? Probably not. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have 20+ friends with 360s, and none of them have experienced problems with their 360s. I have a hard time believing disc read errors, separate audio and visual problems, DOA and exploding consoles are ALL caused by the lack of a heatsink. Like a customer that comes back to PetsMart with dead fish after dead fish, I have trouble believing after 8 dead fish that ALL of the problem is PetsMart selling defective fish.
Eleven in a row is to unlikely (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All heat sink related? Probably not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All heat sink related? Probably not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Justin ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What do they all have in common? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea. That guy.
This is the "Guy who gets broken Xbox 360s." Out of all the people who have them, there's got to be one guy who always gets a bad one.
Still, MS claims the failure rate is around 3%, so that's pretty fricking improbable assuming that they're not lying...We're talking
If I were them, I'd start looking for an external factor. Does he live in an area with an unusually large number of electrical storms per year? Does he have bad wiring? Does he live in a really dusty environment? Is he a huge slob? Does he have the UPS guy from hell? Even if the failure rate on a 360 was 10% (which would be really hard to hide), the odds would still be 100,000,000 to 1 against getting 11 bad ones in a row...'Course they could be sending out refurbs to people who have problems, which very well may have a significantly higher fail rate...
Bah. Puppy needs more data.
Re:5 natural 20s (Score:3, Insightful)
The OP's is a one in 100,000,000,000 - and that's assuming a truly massive failure rate of 10% globally. If you assume a 5% failure rate, the chance plummets to one in 204,800,000,000,000. That's one in 204 trillion.
There's clearly some common factor here, whether it's the UPS delivery man or keeping the XBox and its power supply under an overturned cardboard box while running.
Perhaps even purposefully. I can definitely see the motivation to go through so many XBox units as to get your name on the front page of Digg, Slashdot, and 1up.
MS deserves praise. (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, honestly, if a customer bought something, then brought it back broken, 11 FREAKING TIMES in a row, do you really think most retailers would keep accepting it back, over and over again? Eventually they'd be blaming it on you and refusing to take it back. Instead, MS doesn't seem to care much that this guy has the worlds worst mean failure rate, and aside from getting him to check his wiring, they keep sending him new ones without much question. My personal experience just trying to return my malfunctioning video card twice (well, the first time was the repair return, the second time was because they sent me back the exact same physical card, without repairing it first) tells me that most retailers are complete asshats, and will happily blame you if they can possibly get away with it.
Many other retailers would cut you off or make you start paying, and you wouldn't really have much success complaining "hey, I broke my xbox 10 times in a row, and now they won't send me a replacement for free!". MS keeps pumping them out. They get a +1 in my book for that.
Re:Any statisticicians out there? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know you were looking for theoretical numbers that excluded this, but keep in mind that this is likely a high source of failure for this guy. Of his 11 failed XBox 360s, he received new ones some of the time, but some of them (maybe half? from when I RTFA) were refurbished.
Reasons why refurbished products might have a lower MTBF:
1. Failure was just a symptom of a larger problem. Like, the solder paste used to build the PCB was a little dry, so the paste did not apply evenly or reflow correctly. The original return was for pins with clearly broken/poor solder joints, which were hand retouched. The person who receives the refurbished unit has to deal with all the other solder joints, which might be more susceptible to damage over time and with jolts and vibrations.
2. As another example of the failure being the symptom, perhaps a component in the power supply has an intermittent failure (like a damaged capacitor). When it fails, the voltage rail can temporarily spike. The original owner RMAd the unit for burnt ICs. I would hope Microsoft RMA would trace the root cause, but if they can't reproduce the intermittent failure they might not see it. The next owner could have the box fail in the same way.
3. Even if there was just one failure, and RMA fixed it, applying heat to a PCB always causes internal structural changes. Most PCBs go through two heat cycles (for top and bottom components). Each additional heat cycle wears on the board. After some number of cycles (assume 6 or 7 at best), the layers of the PCB will start to delaminate and there can be internal breaks on traces and vias. Microsoft RMA repaired the original bad chip, but the board was slightly overheated and the PCB separated. The second owner could find vias more susceptible to breaking with light shocks or vibration.
Probably ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's to say, but it would explain why the replacements have been buggy, where a new one might not be.
Then again, maybe they were all new.
Re:User Error (Score:2, Insightful)
either way... the only constant in all of Justin's failed (console) relationships is Justin.
Re:Eleven in a row is to unlikely (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:User Error (Score:1, Insightful)
I've seen this story in a couple different places, and RARELY does it come up that the user might be at fault here. It's much more fun to discuss that Microsoft's manufacturing practices are shady.
Seriously, if you think this is Microsoft's fault you might have some brain damage. And I can explain why with simple math.
Let's say, for a moment, there's a one in ten chance of an Xbox 360 failing within 90 days. That leaves you without the average Justin's getting. These are all returnable systems. We'd be talking the downfall of Microsoft in months, NO ONE can afford that level of faulty hardware, even with a refurbished market.
However, with a one in ten chance, the chances he'd even be on his 10th Xbox 360 lies something to the order of one in ten to the ninth power, or a one with nine zeros after it, otherwise read as A BILLION. One in a billion.
Now, Microsoft's made something like 15 million Xbox 360s.
I'm as big a fan of stories that critisize a hardware dealer's faulty hardware rates, but for fuck's sake, by the time someone makes it to their FOURTH console I stop blaming the manufacturer.
Re:wtf? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Neither Sony or Microsoft are perfect (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I'm staying away from the 360 for that fact alone. At least with the PS3, you can plug in a USB hard drive and back your entire system up in case you ever had a disaster.
Don't be so quick to blame the victim. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not likely that XBox failure rates are >20% (as another poster indicated would be necessary to randomly pick 11 successive failures). It's probably something much simpler like a repair division, refurbishing returned machines and shipping them as replacements. Such a strategy looks good from a business point of view, as you get to "recover" some of cost of failed hardware. However, should the diagnosis be wrong or incomplete, or if the repair center lacks the resources of the production center, your return will be substantially less reliable than a new machine.
Perhaps he chain smokes and his long haired dog likes to cuddle the machine for warmth while his apartment shakes as trains pass outside tossing droplets of condensing water from his window air conditioner into he beloved XBox 360 which is struggling to deal with the 118 Volt 66 Hz electricity. That still doesn't mean that he deserves to put up with the hassle of replacing his system 11 times. If the repair centers note excessive dog hair, water exposure, vibrational damage, dropping, etc. they should notify him and not entertain a 12th replacement. The fact that they are still returning replacements without cutting him off implies that they know they have bigger problems than an abusive customer.
I'm not saying that gaming systems needs to be mil-spec, but from the descriptions I've heard, the XBox 360 isn't the most robust machine out there. I doubt that they could ALL be wrong, even with the skweaky wheels making more noise.
Re:wtf? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Neither Sony or Microsoft are perfect (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the moral of the story is "hardware breaks".
Re:User Error (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect Justin's line voltage or some other equipment.
Perhaps his TV has a fault where it's feeding line voltage back into the system via the A/V cable (or whatever alphabet soup connector he's got.) Maybe he's running his XBox through a hacked Tivo, or his neighbour has a grow-up or an arc welder. As you've stated, he's the only guy this is happening to. It can't possibly be the Xbox. ( It can't probably be the Xbox? )
MS should send a hardware engineer to go check out his setup. Not because they're responsible for fixing it, but because his condition is showing that there's a potential for problems with some auxiliary devices, and they have to be made aware of it. They've already spent $3000+ trying to fix his problem. They might as well get something out of it.
You don't suppose he's using the same power brick on all of the machines, do you?
Re:What do they all have in common? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:User Error (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, I've seen laptops where in an informal survey, I concluded that the failure rate depended in part on whether you were left or right handed as to which corner you lifted when you closed it. No formal study there or anything, and only with a dozen or so data points, but the point is that it could be even the tiniest, most unlikely thing that you wouldn't even think about.
It could be a voltage leak on a cable TV line. That's pretty common, and most devices don't mind it, but some do. It could be dictated by usage pattern---power cycling hurts machines if they can't handle the surge, but long periods of uptime without being turned off can make capacitors fail if the device can't dissipate enough heat. You might even find something bizarre like dry air blowing across something causing a static buildup that can discharge inside a device, causing damage. Connectors improperly mounted can cause board flex, which can cause BGA solder balls to fracture and cause erroneous operation. And so on.
I'm laughing. Just after I wrote the above paragraph, I saw the comment that the BGA fracturing is, in fact, the problem, caused by a bad heat sink design.... *laughs*.