That's a good one.

Honestly, you have to be joking with this. RROD by itself proves that 360 was the worst engineered console ever. How many of the consoles sold were just people buying another 360 to replace the broken one? 

It has the highest failure rate of all consoles. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/xbox-360-failure-rate-542/1100-6215590/

My personal experience with it: It broke almost immediately and I got it replaced. About a year later my new one stopped working again, so I swapped for a third one. Not long after my roommate's console stopped working.

Finally, as of about 8 months ago my third Xbox 360 ceased to function yet again meaning that I no longer have access to that game library unless I get a fourth. 4/4 of the xbox360s I came into contact with, then, are all no longer working and/or were sent in for refurbishment lol

I loved that console when it was working (my fav of the generation) but I'm glad it's in my past. Meanwhile, my Atari VCS, NES, Sega genesis, nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Gamecube, Xbox, PS2, PS3, and Wii all still work just fine. The only other console I've run into trouble with is the original playstation, which skips now.

Obviously those are just personal anecdotes, but I certainly can't rate it too highly for that reason. Besides, has there ever been a noisier console?

The Xbox 360 is a really great console but I'm not sure if "best engineered" is the right phrase (the highest failure rate of all time). It's my 3rd favorite console ever (would be 2nd if the diverse exclusives had continued beyond 2008) but that's because of its superior controller, OS/interface, easy to develop for architecture and price. It's a better console than the PS3 in every aspect with the exception of its game library imo.

1. PS1/N64
2. PS3
3. Xbox 360

The diverse exclusives like Kameo, Dead or Alive, Project Gotham Racing, Dead Rising, Saints Row, Gears of War, Viva Piñata, Crackdown, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Ninja Gaiden, Fable 2 and The Last Remnant all stopped in 2008. From there on the only exclusives (besides Kinect games) were sequels of Halo, Gears and Forza.

Ironically PS3 really started to shine in 2008 and 2009 with exclusives like Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, Valkyria Chronicles, Killzone 2, inFamous, Demon's Souls, Uncharted 2 and Ratchet & Clank: ACiT.

Yes indeed it is 😉

No. For something to be engineered well it has to be reliable. That has been the least reliable mainstream console to date. It wasn't only one issue either, it had many issues and each were known issues or there wouldn't have been direct notifications of each of them with variations of the RROD.
For me, it is actually the N64, but that is because my apartment flooded with the console fully submerged for a night, after a week the of drying out, the console worked perfectly and still does to this day.

As unappealing as I find it's library, looks, and underlying philosophy, even I'll admit PS4 is well engineered from a technical perspective.

Not sure if I'd proclaim it the all time winner though, Gamecube was also an exceptional piece of hardware. (Shame about the software)

I do agree that the 360 had a pretty smart internal architecture and was definitely the best console of the 7th gen in this respect, but when declaring the best engineered console ever you should take into account failure rate and materials quality as well...and the 360 just fails there.

Yup