The Man Who Went Through 11 Xbox 360s

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."

Neither Sony or Microsoft are perfect

[TheMadcapZ]

I am on my second PS3 after the first had a firmware update which is claimed completed. Went to reboot and the system just hangs. Ended up sending it back to Sony and the shipped me a different one. So even though it wasn't a hardware issue, things happen.

No problems with the Wii yet, runs like a champ.

What do they all have in common?

[no_pets]

Other than all being Xbox360s, what else do they all have in common? Perhaps they all came from the same retailer which has a stockboy that liked to drop-kick the Xboxes? Or, perhaps, he has some seriously bad karma.

Re:What do they all have in common?

[Richthofen80]

Perhaps they all came from the same retailer which has a stockboy that liked to drop-kick the Xboxes

This happens a lot; but more likely at UPS or some other freight carrier.

I had friends who worked their way through college by working part-time at a UPS sorting facility. There were a few employees who definitely took out their aggression on merchandise.

Vocal Minority

[pete-classic]

Vocal Minority my ball sack.

I had the three blinking red lights (first example voice prompt on the 360 support line!), and they proceeded to lose my freakin' Xbox. After two weeks of "here's your reference number, call back in a few days" I finally got a voicemail saying that they have the shipping reference . . . but they didn't, you know, leave the fucking reference number.

They sure seem overwhelmed given that they claim to have a below-industry-standard failure rate.

-Peter

Glad I buy at Wal-Mart

[hal2814]

I buy my consoles at Sam's Club or Wal-Mart. Broken 360? Drive to the store and exchange it. Not happy about getting 5th broken 360? Drive to the store and get my money back. No waiting for Microsoft to ship a working unit. No worrying about receiving a refurbished unit to replace the broken one (Some companies do this. Not sure about Microsoft). I personally came to this epiphany when people were discussing PSP dead pixel policies at several different retailers. People who bought from Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Costco or Target just took them back for exchange/refund. Costco is too far away and Target usually has a shorter return window so I'll go to Wal-Mart or Sam's.

Re:What do they all have in common?

[rkanodia]

My parents run a small online retail store. When I would come home from college for breaks, I would help them with packaging and shipping. I used to handle every package like it held Ming vases, each of which was filled Faberge eggs, each of which was in turn filled with normal eggs.

And then one day I had to drive to the UPS facility. After that, it was more like footballs and sacks of potatoes - and that was an order of magnitude better than the care shown by the UPS employees. Pack your boxes well. They are paid to get your stuff there fast and cheap; 'gently' doesn't fit into that equation.

Re:wtf?

[Selfbain]

Hmm, I wonder if they're replacing everything or just the game unit itself. If he's using the same cords and such, that would be my first suspicion.

Re:Let's see a photo of his installation

[Aladrin]

Indeed. When I borrowed my friend's 360 for a week, every time I would remove the DVD from the drive, it would actually be hot to the touch. Not enough to burn me, but enough that I didn't much like holding it, even by the edges. I bought one of those shitty fans for the back, then threw that away and rigged up a system to blow air by the system to help the fan a bit. (Helps my Wii, too, which gets stupidly hot while it's off.)

It's disgustingly easy to overheat a 360, especially if you put it in -any- enclosed space, or too near it's power brick.

The fact that most people don't do 1 of the 2 is some God-given miracle, I think.

Re:Some Wiis did have issues

[CastrTroy]

Although it's not "over"heating, and I haven't had any actual problems yet, does anybody else find that their Wii gets quite hot when you leave it in standby mode, with WiiConnect 24 turned on. I've only had my Wii about a month, but I really think sometimes that I should turn off the WiiConnect 24 because of how hot it gets, and I don't want the heat to get to it after a year and a half, meaning I'll have to buy another one. I really think they should leave the fan on. Or at least have it run intermittently. It's not like it's actually loud enough to hear.

Re:All heat sink related? Probably not.

[internic]

Puppy mills are a large problem, but at least at the PetSmart locations in the D.C. area they don't sell cats or dogs. They do have cats from local shelters there for adoption, though. There's a fee, but AFAIK this goes to the group running the shelter not anyone who bred the dogs.

There are, however, many other pet stores that do sell dogs from puppy mills. Also, I've gotten fish from PetSmart that had ick, so I'm hardly saying that all their animals are healthy or well taken care of.

Re:Other factors...

[Kalendraf]

I have first-hand experience with some homes where there was excessive line noise which in turn wrecked various electronics. One of those houses was my own. There didn't seem to have anything fishy at first, but there was a tendancy for light bulbs in certain sockets in seldomly accessed locations to croak far sooner than expected. After a few years in that house, it progressively got worse. The list of things to die in one 12-month period included a 27" JVC TV, a Sony CD-player, a clock radio, a vacuum cleaner, and finally a nearly new computer trinitron computer monitor. I was annoyed when the TV died exactly 4 years and 1 day after I bought it (which was exactly 1 day past the extended warranty! Go figure!). The CD-player and clock radio were old, so I didn't really care about those. The vacuum had been a gift, but I never really liked it (too low a suction), so when it died, I was actually happy to finally see it go. But then when the monitor died (about 6 months after it's 1 year warranty expired), I got really suspicious and started checking things out.

Sure enough, my line noise was horrible. Some of the power strips I had helped, but both the TV and CD-player had been plugged into an old power strip which had surge protection but did squat for line noise. The clock radio and vacuum were directly plugged into a jack. So was the monitor, being the only item not plugged into my good power-strip used with the rest of my computer (doh!). Since that, I never plug any electronics directly into a socket anymore, and I've updated all my power-strips.

Some friends in the nearby area had similar problems, losing some expensive electronics, and then discovered they too had terrible line noise. Since taking my advice and switching to good power-strips, I know of no more electronics fallout from them.

I've recently moved, and the new house has low line noise (so far at least), but I'm still using power-strips just in case. I'm planning to eventually get a 360, and when I do, I will definitely safeguard it with a good power-strip.

Re:What do they all have in common?

[im_thatoneguy]

TFA mentions that Microsoft on several occasions asked him to check his power. He did and found no problems.

Without long term monitoring there is no way to know if he doesn't get the odd spike every 3 weeks or so I suppose his testing isn't conclusive but power does not seem to be the problem.

Just got back my first Xbox. Besides being without an Xbox for 2 weeks it was overall a very pleasant experience. Called support. Talked for 15 minutes. They decided it needed to be serviced and started the process. I hadn't registered for the standard warantee but they just asked when I purchased it and registered it right then and there which was grateful for. Glad they weren't dicks and didn't honor the warantee because I didn't register it when I bought. I suppose I could have lied and told them a later date than when I actually bought it but, they didn't require any proof. Very consumer conscious.

2 weeks later, I have a replacement Xbox. Spent the 5 minutes setting it up. Popped in my HDD and everything is back to normal.

Overall I would give them a 10/10. No waiting on the phone. No warantee evasion. I could probably tolerate going through the process a time or two. Of course by 11, I would expect microsoft to just immediately mail out two new 360s and hope for the best.

refurbished xbox's

[c_jonescc]

Frankly, I'm not too surprised of his luck considering that MS sends out refurbished machines as replacements. I normally used to think that refurbished electronics were a safe way to save some money, and often times had a few spanking new parts making them more reliable that some alternatives.

Then a friend of mine bought a refurbished xbox (not a 360 though). Thing crapped out. As did it's replacement. And the one after that. After the 3rd, he just gave up, took a refund, and went to the store to buy a new unit. No problems since.

We ended up deciding that MS must not really be doing comprehensive quality control on it's rebuilds, and that they're only fixing the most easily spotted problem on returned units (if that much) and not looking for deeper failures.

I don't trust the refurbished xbox at all. And, honestly, I'm now a bit weary of buying any refurbished electronics.

So, for all those statisticians quoting 1 in 204 trillion odds, I think it's safer to say that a spanking new unit has that failure rate, while a refurbished unit might have a failure rate much closer to unity. If they'd bothered to send him a new unit at any point for his troubles, my bet is he'd have a much better chance at keeping the thing (and it might not help to dust!)

stats

[f1055man]

at first I thought this was impossible, but the article mentions that two of the eleven were DOA. Hard to blame DOAs on the user. With a 20% DOA rate this becomes a bit more believable. My guess is they keep sending refurb units that are just crap they get to boot up, but still can't handle real use.

Re:User Error

[arth1]

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.

Actually, no. Failures don't follow a pure exponential, but is a bell curve. There's many possible contributing factors to failure, and particular users can be off the median on several of those, without being outside the operating requirements.

A customer's electricity, while OK, might be on the high voltage or high variation side of the OK spectrum. The room temperature, while inside the recommended range, might be on the high side. The air moisture might be lower or higher than average. Customer might have furry pets, which while not wrong, will cause a higher average failure rate. They might live in a high pollution area, or at a high altitude where air flow cools less. The weather patterns might be more extreme than normal. These (and many more) are all contributing factors that while they are within operating specs all ensures that there will be long tails on the bell curve, and certain customers that experience far more problems than others. They're not to blame either, nor is any one of these conditions a problem in itself. It's combinations, which is why you'll always get far more anomalies than you'd think.

Re:What do they all have in common?

[darkwhite]

What I found is that UPS employees seem to treat different parties' boxes very differently. I've received countless shipments from online stores that were pristine - it was obvious that they weren't subject to even the slightest shock in transit. Then there were a few from smaller merchants that were a little beat up, but never seriously. And then there were personal shipments that I or my friends had sent - and those were almost always beat up, corners crushed in, sides bent, and contents damaged.

Re:Eleven in a row is to unlikely

[greed]

Yup. That's your most likely culprit; bad replacements because they're not newly manufactured.

Apple had a similar problem: a design flaw in the iBook G3 series lead to the GPU cracking its mount on the circuit board, or the traces on the board, and leading to really neat "I never thought an LCD could look like that" video patterns. They instituted the iBook G3 Logic Board Repair Extension to cover all affected machines. (After a lawsuit... Apple gets sued a lot for bad software and hardware. Why doesn't Microsoft get sued even more? They've got more users.)

...but the chances of getting a new board were very slim; usually you got a refurbished board. (Perhaps one from a different fault in a warranty returned machine, perhaps one that had already failed and been repaired.)

...and of course, the thermal design problem still existed....

So, when you got your machine back, you most likely had a weaker board than a new machine, and the design flaw that caused the original failure was still there, but the net effect was to lower the MTBF from "year or so" to "month or so". I had one fail the day I brought the machine back home. The best replacement lasted 6 months; average was about 6 weeks. And each repair took longer and longer, from 2 weeks initially to 3-5 by the 6th board. I guess they were having trouble getting working boards in.

Finally, I had Pointed Words with the Customer Relations people at Apple and they solved the iBook G3 problem once and for all. I have never had an iBook G3 fail since then.

(There seems to be a similar thermal flaw in the iBook G4, but instead it cracks the interface to the WiFi and Bluetooth radio module.)

So, I can easily see that once you get a warranty replacement unit, you're on the downward spiral. The only exception is getting a real, new, sealed unit; only then are you back to the same base probability of failure as everyone else.

Re:What do they all have in common?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a UPS Corporate employee, I can tell you that all UPS facilities are instructed to inform their customers that every package should be packed well enough to take up to a 3-4 foot fall. The package design and test lab even works with companies that want to have packaging designed to handle these requirements. The Customer Centers are to inspect every box and reject any box that looks as though it's not packed well enough. (Yeah, like that always happens...) Not that the hubs are full of 3 feet drops, but if a package falls off a belt because of a backup, there's less risk of a damage payment. There are very few belts that have no side rails. And those without side rails are open to accommodate employee handling (waist height, 3-4 feet) Most drops from belt to belt are actually quite smooth and if the employee moving the boxes handled the package with care, you could ship an egg without it breaking. Of course, we deal with the union, disputes, and outraged employees, but you can't really avoid that entirely.

I understand if your skeptical since I pretty much admitted to being "the man", but the intentions of Corporate UPS actually do reflect one of protecting the customer's package since we are most definitely in the service and transportation industries and without that service, we'd have to face the accountants, cutbacks and even the union for lack of work.

Re:Some Wiis did have issues

[jasen666]

I don't use the straps.
My kids haven't even thrown the damn things. Maybe dropped it once, but not thrown.
And the damn wiimotes are not very heavy. It would take quite some speed to get it to break a TV.

I know of a chap up to seven.

[AbRASiON]

I know it's third hand information but I regularly speak with people on a popular gaming messageboard and one of the guys there is up to seven consoles, he has no reason to lie, seriously.

He's used a UPS , Power conditioner, he's even moved house (co-incidentally) I think he's tried multiple TV's - he's pretty much eliminated all the variables and still 7 down.
He loves the games on the system and is always |_| so close to swapping to a PS3 but ultimately the games he loves are on the 360.

It's a real shame and it's why I don't own one yet myself (and dipshit Microsoft love halting the release of products in other regions! Hello, Australia want the elite too!)
Either way, that's an appauling amount of consoles to fail.
Also one of the members of this particular forum ran a 'survey' system which had about 500 or so users on there, each time one failed they incrimented the number for each user.
A large quantity of guys only had 1 console, no failures but ultimately it worked out to around a 20% failure rate according to his survey, with of course the guy with 7 dead ones at the top of the list.

Crazy stuff, I'm waiting for the 'fixed' edition! (it better come out before GTA4 goddamnit!)

Re:What do they all have in common?

[drb_chimaera]

My Ex-housemate had a similar problem - bought a laptop off eBay and got an empty box. Immediately we thought he'd been scammed but as soon as we started checking into it we found that the package had been weighed on the way into the depot and on the way out at there was a roughly 2kg difference - the weight of the laptop and the AC adapter. Just to hammer the point home when the shipping manager went to ask the delivery driver about it, the dumbfuck was using the laptop in his van at work.

Actually, this does tell us something

[LKM]

No, the moral of the story is ones own experiences do not paint the full picture any more than one guy replacing his 360 11 times.

Actually, a single dead console doesn't mean anything. One person having 11 dead consoles, however, does. If you have a hardware defect rate of 5% within a year, one in 20 people will have to replace their console within one year. That's nothing out of the ordinary. However, the probability of killing 11 consoles, given the same hardware defect rate, is about 0.05^11 (not quite, since you don't start out with all 11 consoles, so consoles you get later have less time to break within the same first year). In other words, only one in about 204,800,104,857,653 persons will have to replace 11 consoles. Microsoft has, however, only sold about 10'000'000 consoles

What does this tell us? Either this guy is doing something wrong, or Microsoft's hardware defect rate must be way above 5% per year.