Andrespetmonkey said:
55? Link? I remember it being around 30%, which is still really bad, but 55 is just shocking |
There is no real source because he has simply believed a ridiculous article to back up some bias. As the link he posted showed his 'statistics' are from a reader poll by a gaming magazine. A reader poll isn't a good measure of something in a balanced way. Especially not at a time when MS was very unpopular due to the RRoD issue. The way to know is to look at actual hardware failures, not trust what people say.
The only things approaching vageuly reliably figures we ever got was:
1) First few months MS stated the rate was with-in 3-5% normal error. This was clearly just early days and it rose from there.
2) An article at Venturebeat from the guy who wrote the two books on the history of Xbox and 360 stated that of the 11.6million shipped, 1.2million had failed. His source was anonymous so it's hard to verify.
3) The same guy quoted a MS engineer that 3-4 months before release the failure rate was still 68%. However it is likely this was still in the phase of improving production so we have no idea where it finished when they started making launch units. This was denied by MS and the source was anonymous so is difficult to verify.
4) Squaretrade a warranty provider looked at around a thousand consoles and found a failure rate of 16.4% but said they expected long term it would be higher.
The most realiable figures for consoles in consumer hands is either the 1.2 out of 11.6 million or 16.4% but expected to be higher. So seemingly 10-20% would be the most 'official' figure. However personally my guess is the failures were around 25-30% in the long run. There was a rumour from gamestop that this is what they experienced. Still a very high failure but no where near 55%.
I also suspect a certain percentage were simply because the 360 was the first console that had to be treated more like a pc. You couldn't put it in a sealed entertainment cabinet, on carpet etc etc. Seriously if someone's console failed once or twice, yea probably a manufacturing problem. However you had people saying they were on their fifth, sixth system etc. That person was doing something wrong. They had a fan blocked by carpet, had put it somewhere where the heat could barely escape etc etc.
To this day I still remember a reasonably well known thread on Neogaf. Where a user lamented how he had gone through multiple 360s (I believe he was on number 5 or something). He complained how dreadful the build quality was etc etc. Then he posted a picture to show his set up. His 360 was standing vertically on top of a MASSIVE subwoofer. So a subwoofer that is there for bass and makes lots of vibrations and you have a delicate console sitting on top of it.... hmmmm. So spinning disc + deep vibrations. The user then tried to back pedal and claim his subwoofer was a wine cooler that just so happened to be identical to a known subwoofer model and it wasn't his fault the consoles were breaking.
