Well designed. But shit quality control.
It was very much rushed out the door, but the entire philosophy of the devices design was top notch. - It's where Microsoft showed it could actually be competent in hardware design... Where-as Sony had already been proving that for decades prior.

But issues will crop up in any device, the PS1 and PS2 had their share of hardware issues, mostly disk-drive related.
Sony also had exploding notebook batteries at one point... Samsung had the explosive Galaxy Note 7... These things can slip past quality control even with stringent testing regardless of manufacturer.

As consumers we are lucky that information regarding these facets can be readily accessed so we can make informed purchasing decisions when it comes to purchasing time.

Well. The Playstation 3 wasn't immune to hardware failures either. The YLOD was a fairly common issue especially with the launch units where numbers like 20-50% were being thrown around at one point. (Although I am unable to find anything empirical, just that it was a common thing.)

Anything man-made is prone to fail, it's only a matter of time... But we need to give criticism and credit where it's due.

The drive itself was an off-the-shelf OEM drive anyway. It slipped past quality control, I assume they thought it would be all A-OK considering the drive was already used in other markets in other devices.

Am I excusing Microsoft for their choice? No. They should have chosen better, they should have spent more time doing Quality-testing, the console is still well designed though with some pretty good decisions made on the components and aesthetics... The engineers just weren't given enough time.

You can bet Microsoft cared. Especially when the repair bill started to end up in the Billions.

Some of the issues like the solder was because of industry trends to be "greener" and less "toxic". - The PC had already been moving in that direction for a long time prior to the Xbox 360's launch, so assumptions were probably made on it's viability rather than spending the months of testing required.

In the end... The lessons learned with the Xbox 360's hardware translated over to the Xbox One, which from a hardware reliability standpoint is the ducks nuts, cooling, power delivery and so on is pretty much over-engineered and top notch... In many aspects superior to the base Playstation 4. - Despite the fact that the Playstation 4 was cheaper and a more powerful device and superior in every other area.

Sorry Pema, I regards your PC knowledge very highly but QUALITY is part of design. So if something is of very bad reliability (one aspect of quality) it can't be said to be very well designed.

You can say that it was a great concept or that the aesthetic was great, you can say it was very well balanced, etc. But when you talk about the whole product being well designed that would be wrong.

Because as much as there are real data to compare performance between system that you use to prove when people are saying wrong stuff on comparison there are data to show the system are not well designed.

And yes PS3 also had a much higher than standard failure rate, but X360 overshadowed it by many miles.

Sure. I will give you that quality is part of a design, but sometimes things slip past testing and doesn't become apparent until it's out in the real world. - And I am not aware of any manufacturer (Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo, Samsung, nVidia, AMD etc') having a perfect track record to that end.

The OG fat PS3's had a notorious issue with the Yellow Light of Death. - Yet I wouldn't outright state that the original fat Playstation 3's were badly designed... They were extremely well designed, often bordering on being over-engineered... But things slipped past quality control. - Same goes for the Xbox 360, the launch consoles were fantastically designed, even down to the choice of components.

But the issue with the solder wasn't a well documented design issue until the same issue started to appear in other pieces of hardware like nVidia GPU's... Granted, that mistake won't be taken by any company again soon and will be factored into future designs.

Oh, I recognize that the failure rates from Sony and Microsoft's launch consoles were far from ideal, but I am not going to bag an entire generation of hardware from either company for a little misshap. - Both companies took substantial measures to rectify the issues.

But the design concepts both companies entered the 7th gen in had allot of similarities, but also different philosophies.
The Xbox 360 could have spent another 6-12 months in the lab being tested, that's for sure.

I don't actually disagree. I don't really favor any console, so I am trying to look at it from a perspective that others may not.

I certainly can agree that sometimes your great design will be taken by surprise on reliability issues that couldn't be foreseen (that is what in aviation generally end up making Airworthiness Directives). Some times you'll discover something totally new and unexpected after the project was tested a lot.

Still in the case of X360 my understanding is that their rush to release led to the issues (and that was my initial pitch, that the design philosophy was good, but they rushed the system out and that led to high failure rates) which was then countered saying they launched when they were supposed to. Then my understanding is that if they didn't rush they were incompetent in the design, because again I totally understand you designing for 1-5% failure rate in 2 years but something you couldn't see made it increase to 10%, but the problem on X360 were much bigger that is the reason I put that for original X360 it was bad design even if a great system.

Anyway I do agree that we can't discount the whole gen, but I would say that the high failure rate of the og X360 made they exaggerate on the size of X1 and together with the issues of reveal and they not supporting the last 2 years of X360 as well as Sony made the sales slower (after the first 2 months) than they would. I expect that for the next machine they and Sony will be very competitive on price, spec and reliability.

Indeed!

In the Xbox 360's case it was a multitude of aspects that resulted in the RROD issue, why is why it wasn't a simple overnight fix.

The new solder was more brittle, would end up with hairline cracks... That was exacerbated by the heat-sink mounting system which applied significant pressure... And the sheer heat of the chips.
You solve one of those things... And failure rates would have dropped significantly, but not entirely.

nVidia also had it's fair share of solder issues with it's Geforce 8000/9000 chips which cost the company a big chunk of change... It just was not something that was ever tested for... So it was entirely new waters for the industry.
Obviously things have changed since then for the better and the lessons learned by Microsoft and nVidia isn't lost on the entire industry.

https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Nvidia-GPU-failure,news-29026.html

The RROD of the Xbox 360 was totally unacceptable, the console needed more development time, Microsoft does have some amazing engineers at it's disposal. - But these things do happen though, no company is immune... And Microsoft does deserve the criticism where it dropped the ball, no doubt about it.

Indeed. The Xbox One size is likely attributed to the Xbox 360's initial issues... Plus that Heatsink and Fan was extremely chunky, more so than it needed to be... It did mean that it was extremely quiet and cool running though.