While know one truely knows what was fixed when - I think it's generally accepted that RROD was fixed (not impossible, but down to to normal failure rates) with Falcon - about 18 months after the initial release.

I am not sure any type of consumer electronic merchandise has had as high a failure rate as the 360.

No I don't think So.

Apparently, I'm the only one who remembers the Magnovox Explode-atron from 1982. It wasn't very popular.

Dreamcast, Saturn, GameCube, Xbox, TurboGrafx-16, NEO GEO...

Oh wait! We're talking about the hardware itself...not the sales!

PS2 , even now it has some problems with unreadable disks...

Oh god, the Neo Geo, now that was a great system.  I was the coolest kid on the block because I had one... and all I had to trade for it was a spare NES console and a few games.  That was the greatest barter of my life.

Launch console had the highest failure rates around 25% on the first 6 million consoles sold in the first year. Since then the failure rate have decreased due to MS improving the design of the console through better chips within the newer X360 console.
I believe hardware failure rates are around 5% nowadays in the new consoles sold in the past 12 months

Well OP if you are trying to make the 360 sound bad and dwarf the numbers to help out the overall numbers of the PS3, I think that you did the opposite.

So then by your math 4 million less 360's out on the market. Now take into affect the software sales each week. Makes the PS3 look even worse. How is the 360 outselling it so huge in software if the gap is only 3 million.

I can weigh in, being on my 3rd 360. 66% of mine have failed on me.