It's a rumor, but it's interesting:

 Just a rumor, but it wouldn't surprise me, especially since early revisions didn't hurt the GBA and DS.

I think this is a logical change, because they pretty much alter the entire motherboard to accommodate the changes to 65nm technology.

Good job, MS.

But the 360's failure rate is an acceptable 3% and people should understand that everything breaks sometimes, so why are they fixing anything? At any rate, good to see MS may be finally doing something about the ring of death, though I can't shake the feeling that this should have been added in early 2005 not now.  If after a year the ring of death issues end and the price drops below $300 I'll definitely be adding a 360 to my video game stash.

i am really friggin' curious where you got this 3% failure rate. - it is just wrong. The stats for the 360 are; for non-fixable problem with first failure (requires a replacement product) 32%, for secondary failure (meaning it is fixed/refurbished and then resent) 34.5%, amount of people who had the issue fixed just by calling microsoft support [i am not even sure how that is possible, either it's broken or not - a phone call won't fix it] 12%.  and the final amount who say they have never had a problem that they contacted microsoft about 21.5%.

So let's recap 'Mr.3%' this means the realtime failure rate (the percentage of 360 consoles that have been either repaired or replaced) is 66.5% - THAT'S OVER TWO THIRDS.  think of it, 2/3 of all 360's sold at the store come back to microsoft at some point in their life.

 There are plenty of sources that confirm simliar numbers, inlcuding numbers from other places then america or japan. for instance check out www.mygen.com.au and look for the 360 forum that talks about hardware. (it's an australian site)

3%, prfft. I am thinking you work for microsoft to say they have 'acceptable' failure rate.

Yeah, forums are always accurate. I've seen astronomical numbers for failure on forums and in my personal experience, they're nowhere near accurate. People are far more likely to bitch if something goes wrong than they are to praise something that just works, skewing any polling numbers.

While I believe that the failure rate is above 3%, it's NOWHERE NEAR 66%. That's automatic class-action lawsuit territory and we'd be hearing a lot more about it if units were failing at that rate.

Wow! Talk about missing sarcarsm.  You did the read the rest where I said that it's good they are fixing the failure problem and that if the 360 can prove reliable I'll finally buy one?  That should have been enough context to understand I was sarcastic about the 3% failure rate. 

Anyhow, the 3% came from MS themselves.  I think it's been modified from a straight 3 to 3-5%.  Clearly the problem is far greater than that.  I'm not going to argue the exact % simply because no one knows except that it is far higher than 3% as MS claims.  Read various gaming sites on a regular basis if you want to know exactly where that came from, I've heard it enough in forums I thought it was common knowledge amongst gamers.

The last comment is almost to funny to reply to, just check out some of my more recent comments from my profile to see how much of a fan I am of MS.  In case that's too much work I'll just give a brief summation here, I had an Xbox and liked it well enough, but I like very little about the 360.  I don't know why but I'm strange like the Japanese, I expect $400 items to not break within a year.  Make it a $250-300 item and cut the breaking to say 3-4 years and I'm sure I'd like the 360 well enough also but not until then.  An MS shill I am most certainly not.