The misinformation in the article is terrible, fillet has highlighted the mistakes though so no need to repeat too much. I think generally though the issue of the console reliability does need addressing on the 360's successor it's just the fact they blamed it on cheap components that I disagreed with mainly. Lead Free solder had a huge impact on the 360's reliability and issues (and the PS3's too).

I think Microsoft pushed the boundaries closer than Sony on heat tolerances and got burned which is what I may have mentioned had I wrote that article. I think the guy never researched the true reasons behind the high failure rate of the 360 and took the lazy route imo.

Only 5? I would say that is pretty good especially when they come up with stuff as faceplates... I wonder how many mistakes they have for Sony.. 30? 50?

Ask D-Joe he haves the kinky stuff.

they handled rrod well? really? they blambed everyhing on the consumer, downplayed the failuer rate, and told people they sratched thier disk by moving thier console around. it wasnt until they were face with being forced to remove it from the market that they finaly did something about thier piss poor design . ms was never and will never be a hard ware company. your only fooling your self if you think the next box will be any better. thier damn racing wheel was known to catch fire. are these the best five mistakes they could come up with?

The Xbox was the first console I ever owned that broke. Mine RROD the day Fallout 3 came out in Australia. Leaving the vault for the first time and I never got to see the outside world. As mad as I was I went out and bought an Acade the next week bacause the estimated time was 6 weeks for my Pro to be fixed and I didn't wanna wait. But it only took 2 weeks so I think Microsoft done a pretty good job handling it with whoever they employed to take care of the situation.

Yea I am aware of solder considering I used to be a BGA and ECN tech at Flextronics.   Apparently, they didn't run enough "real world" test to see that the PCB bends.  There were obvious design flaws in the first generation of 360s that they finally fixed.  Didn't the Jasper chips pretty much eliminate the RROD or drastically reduce it once they came out?

They did several revisions but the Jasper did resolve the issues for the old motherboard layout and of course the Slim maintained this reliability with the new layout.  You can of course still get RROD with a Jasper board but the actual RROD is a general fault code for the 360 and only the secondary code can tell you if it is the old favourite "0102". 

I think Microsoft did consider increasing the board thickness in the 360 but realised it would cause possible issues with timing so they decided to reduce the heat through die shrinks to the CPU and GPU to stop the board warping through heat exchange.  They obviously also tried the quick and dirty fixes of gluing chips to the board and changing the xclamp tension so as not to provide as much pressure on the board.  I believe the Falcon HDMI chassis altered the board fixing heights to minimize board flex, it also introduced improved heatsinks.  They literally tried everything to make up for the systemic fault introduced by the fact their design spec was finalized before the lead free solder legislation.  I honestly don't think they knew exactly what the issue was until 12 months after release and then they were firefighting looking for a resolution.

People ask if Microsoft could have been handled RROD better, in my opinion once they knew the scale of the problem they delayed until they knew precisely the ramifications of what they'd done and that they could finance the cost of the mistake.  I think they handled it as well as can be expected given it was unprecedented.  This of course is no excuse and people who were out of pocket thanks to Microsoft, have every right to be angry and I would probably have taken legal action under the Sales of Goods act in the UK had I been affected.

I'm not talking about games requiring multiple discs. I'm talking about the Xbox 360 scratching your CD to the point where it is unreadable.

Ah, my mistake. Indeed that was an issue, I believe warranties helped address that.

There have been a lot of similar complaints with the PS2 though.

I only speak from experience.

When I think about it, to be honest I have never had a problem with Playstation CDs to an alarming extent. I may have had one or 2 games act up in the last 12 years, but not enough to even remember. I was not a stickler for keeping them nice and tidy either. But with the 360, I have born witness to dozens of scratched, chipped, and melted??? game discs from all over.

It is really the worst console I have ever had in terms of games working  on it properly.