I've done some research into the 360 failure issues.
SquareTrade performed an examination with 1040 Xbox 360s. The findings were that 16.4% failed within six to ten months, and they stated that the results were likely
much lower than reality, given the short test period.
CaptainCrunch said:
Because the study doesn't make a specific claim to exclude those people. Out of a small sample size (>.005% of console owners), you can derive absolutely nothing about the average user's habits. How many do you think read the manual, including the "Proper Care Instructions?" It's as much a smoking gun as a faulty heatsink / fan - in fact, it's the hand holding the smoking gun in a lot of cases.
So because those who mistreat their consoles are not excluded, the 54.2%
must be made of mistreaters
exclusively?
Even if you compromise to say that
half of the failure rate claimed in this poll are user-related, that's still 27.1% failure due to hardware, which is
5 to 9 times higher than the industry standard (3-5%).
Even if you believe the real failure rate to be more like the study performed by SquareTrade, and halve that due to user-related error, that's still 8.2% due to hardware, which is still double industry standard. And that's not even including the fact that SquareTrade claimed the real figure would be much higher.
"Less hearty" really isn't strong enough wording.
CaptainCrunch said:
... had the ventilation blocked (especially when the warranty is iffy about that specific circumstance)?
By blocking the ventilation I assume you mean aligning the console horizontally, as other users have claimed in this thread?
Remember the console has rubber feet on its side and is shown in the Welcome video on its side.
By placing it horizontally, I am not breaking any rule, written in any official documentation. So whether or not I am "blocking ventilation" I am perfectly within my rights to.
If placing it on its side was as bad as some people claim, then surely Micro$oft would've dicovered it while they were
testing them to destruction, and redesigned appropriately.
EDIT:
thebobmaster said:
... That would be like using the town of Desoto, Texas, to judge population trends for the entire U.S. ...
No, actually, it's nothing like that.
Game Informer will have readers from various age groups, backgrounds, cultures and countries. It's more like taking roughly 291 randomly chosen people from every state, and judging trends for the entire U.S. with them, which sounds pretty fair to me. And professional survey companies agree, as taking a survey of 15000 thousand people is
rare, even when testing as large a group as the entire population of America.
I got 291 by calculating one-fiftieth (removing the decimal of the final result, as you can't have a fraction of a human) of an equally proportioned survey, which for America would be roughly 15000, as America is roughly three times larger than the whole current-gen console owning population of the world.
thebobmaster said:
... Not to mention that people would probably more likely write in that their 360's failed, rather than that they didn't.
And by that logic, they'd also be more likely to write in if their PS3 or Wii had failed also. So, how comes the PS3 and Wii are so much lower?
If we assume that roughly an equal amount of each console's owners read
Game Informer(as that is the only resonable assumption as it is considered a "neutral" magazine, rather than being aligned to one brand), then if people wrote in just because their console had failed, surely the one owned by the most people (which would also be the largest share of the readers) would have the largest slice of this poll?
Market share to the second decimal point, according to Wikipedia's total sales figures, against their claimed failure rate, according to this poll, in respective order;
Wii..............48.27%.........6.8%
Xbox 360...28.93%......54.2%
PS3............22.80%......10.6%
Well that is clearly not the case, as the Wii, with approaching double the 360's sales, is the
lowest death rate on the list. And the PS3, with less that 7% less market share than the 360, is behind it on this poll by over 40%!
I think it's fair to say that "people just writing in because their console failed" inflated the number some, but I also think it would be unfair to assume any more than 5% being due to this, which would still put the Xbox 360 brick rate at 49.2%.
2nd EDIT: Added market share percentages.
) I too wish that Microsoft had made it better, however, for the moment, that doesn't affect me.
