Sony: PS5 not due out before April 2020

[DonFerrari]

Pemalite said:

DonFerrari said:

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.

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.

DonFerrari said:

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.

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.

DonFerrari said:

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.

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.