I'm sure you get stories like this all the time, and I'm sure the news is old (Xbox 360s break, they suck, haha), but this isn't so much a story about an Xbox being broken as it is a story about Xbox support failing to repair and identify the problem after a few months and three repairs. I can't get anyone at Microsoft to even apologize for them messing up over and over time and time again, so I thought I'd take to the internet to see if anyone wants to write about a true Xbox Support horror story.

I'm 25 years old, work in a professional office building as a newspaper designer, am married, have a son and am not very dumb.

Xbox got four red lights back in July. My Xbox is still under warranty, but warranty doesn't cover four red lights. I happily send them $100. [Ed note: 4 red lights is code for a missing AV cable, but can be caused by other issues. 3 red lights is the famous RRoD and is covered by the warranty.]

Four weeks after putting in the repair order, the Xbox was sent back fixed. It is now August. It took four weeks for the repair to complete in part because of shipping problems, including five boxes being delivered to my door and two instances of undeliverable addresses. Really, the repair only took a week. Getting the correct box to my house took three weeks.

Three weeks after I got it back, on August 27, I got three red lights about ten minutes away from beating Shadow Complex with 100% items found.

About 2 weeks after repair was ordered, Xbox was returned to me – three red lights remained.
About 2 weeks after repair was ordered, Xbox was returned to me – three red lights remained.
About 2 weeks after repair was ordered, Xbox was returned to me – three red lights remained.
(that's not a typo. I sent it in three times, and it was sent back still broken three times)

It is now October. I took to Twitter to rage about Microsoft and a friend asked me if I checked the lights on the power supply. No person at any point in this repair process going all the way back to July has ever asked me or told me or hinted about or mentioned the light on the power supply indicating the power supply might be faulty. I checked it, and the power supply was orange. I'd bet the very first time I got the three red lights, this might've been the problem. Why no one in the process, after the Xbox came back to me "unrepaired," asked me to check the power supply I do not know.

After much convincing, a new power supply was ordered sent to me by Microsoft. It arrived after a week. The male power supply didn't fit into my female Xbox port. Apparently, Xbox has used a few different kinds of power supplies over the years.

Today, October 7, the new power supply has been ordered and might arrive in 2-3 weeks (they have to process the request, 7 days they say, and then ship it, 5 days. Add weekends off and time to deliver, and it'll be 2-3 weeks).

So after all that, I've been able to play my 360 for about three weeks total since July... Am I at fault? Maybe 1% of this is my fault – I could've looked online for more reasons the three red lights might happen, at which point I would've found out about the power supply problem… but still, that's no excuse, because it isn't my friends job to fix my console, it is Microsoft's job, and they have failed.

Andy Phifer
Houston, Texas

I don't think anyone can blame Andy for not self-diagnosing his Xbox issue. Anyone who's dealt with any sort of technical support before knows that nothing gets the operator riled up more than a valid self-diagnosis. These calls are heavily scripted to cater to the lowest common denominator.

But when that script clearly can't diagnose a common problem (more than once) and the customer is punished for months because of it, I mean, come on. Given Microsoft's apparent fundamental troubleshooting flaws at work in this story, we have a tough time believing that there's only one "Andy" out there. [Image]

UPDATE: Looks like Microsoft stepped up to the plate to take care of Andy. Since his story hit the web, he's received tech support call with the full white glove treatment.

FairTrade, the company that's making this claim, bases their little theory on failure rates correlated with purchase date. Before the Jasper chipset, they were atrocious. But after? Not too bad!

In Q4 2008, Jasper units started arriving, although we believe units purchased during this period continued to be a mix of Falcon and Jasper models. Even with this mix, we projected the 1-year failure rate to drop below 4%. Furthermore, when looking at over 500 units purchased in 2009, fewer than 1% of customers have reported a RROD error as of Aug 2009. It is still too early to definitively assert that Jasper has given RROD a knockout punch, but such an argument may be pronounceable in the coming months.

That's down from an (admittedly) conservative RRoD rate of about 12%, which accounted for more than half of the console's overall failures, which stood at 23.7%. They explicitly say it's too early to call this one, but early signs—even if all the numbers are skewed a little low—are definitely promising.

The best case for not believing these figures, though, is (weirdly) made earlier in the report, when SquareTrade theorizes about how consumers might be approaching the Xbox failure problem, now that it's so well known:

Microsoft's policy may result in an underreporting of failures by Xbox 360 owners to SquareTrade, relative to the other two consoles. Because the RROD problem is so widely known to be covered by Microsoft's warranty, we believe that more customers bypass SquareTrade and reported failures directly to the Microsoft.

So on this side of things, third-party warranty stats aren't infallible, and on anotherhttp://gizmodo.com/5344302/microsoft-responds-to-542-xbox-360-failure-rate-claim-doesnt-dispute-it, user surveys about a frustrating hardware problem are naturally stacked against the product. The only people who really know how many Xboxen run off the cliff every year work in Redmond, and I doubt they're in any rush to get too specific on this one. [GameInformer via Kotaku]

Here's the response:

Microsoft stands behind the Xbox 360 as a superior entertainment console with one of the best warranties in the industry. We are constantly improving the design, manufacture and performance of the console through extensive testing of potential sources of any problems. Xbox 360 is pleased to maintain the title of 'most played console' and the vast majority of Xbox 360 customers have enjoyed a terrific gaming and entertainment experience since their first day, and continue to, day in and day out.

Just because they failed to contest the figure, however, doesn't mean it's legit. That Game Informer survey was of its readers, which is surely not a truly representative sample of all Xbox 360 owners. Those nerds surely play their consoles a lot harder than your average gamer. But still, it's telling that Microsoft didn't want to get into a numbers fight over the failure rate. After all, if it isn't 54.2%, what is it, Microsoft? It's not like them saying "No, it's not that! It's only 35%!" would be a great move. [TG Daily via Kotaku]

As someone who just got his second red ring in as many years, is it really that surprising that about half of all Xboxes have shit the bed? Personally, I don't know a single person with an Xbox 360 who hasn't had to deal with it, so hell, maybe the 54.2% figure is generous.

Comparatively, the PS3 has a failure rate of 10.6% and the Wii is at 6.8%. But despite these numbers, gamers play the Xbox the most; 40.3% play it 3 to 5 hours a day, with 37% of PS3 owners doing the same. And unsurprisingly, a full 40.4% of Wii owners turn that console on less than an hour a day.

And that's really the big takeaway here. It's not news that older Xbox 360s fail almost inevitably, but it's interesting that gamers have almost accepted that fact and still play the Xbox despite it. In fact, a mere 3.8% of gamers said that hardware failure will keep them from ever buying another Xbox. I guess people just really like their 1 vs. 100. [Consumerist via Kotaku]

A Consumerist reader complained that after his Xbox red-ringed – again – he called Microsoft to get a shipping box to mail his console in for repairs. But the customer service rep told him he'd need to find his own box. As he pointed out, this gives them a possible out. Who's to stop them from claiming the box was damaged in the mail?

My Xbox red-ringed for the second time this weekend. Which is almost a relief after hearing how bad my disc drive was sounding, but not so much after hearing the new policy. I was told that Xbox no longer ships out a box to you and you must find a box to ship it out in. Yeah I guess its not a big deal, but I think it gives them another thing to hold over your head; "We are sorry, Sir, but you didn't back it well enough and it appears the damage was due to shipping, we cannot help you."

Bummer move, Microsoft, especially over something that's very much your own fault.

Update: Microsoft is saying that they do in fact still ship boxes to customers with broken Xboxes (if the customers ask for one), according to Kotaku. Which would mean this whole debacle is just one case of one employee being terrible, rather than the entire company. Unless you count how people wouldn't need to ship their Xboxes in anyway if the company had bothered making them right in the first place.

[The Consumerist]

Results from "Which Missing iPhone Feature Would You Like to See Most?"

Picture messaging 19%
iChat 4%
Landscape mode For email 5%
Ability to use the iPhone 3G with other service providers (not just AT&T) 8%
Downloadable ringtones <1%
User-replacable battery 3%
More storage 2%
Search function with contacts <1%
Ability to edit documents 2%
Flash/Java 20%
Cut and paste 20%
GPS turn-by-turn directions 11%
Video recording 6%

Here are a couple of the more jaw-dropping excerpts:

Most of the problems pointed to as the cause of the epidemic of Red Rings of Death showed up way before launch, naturally:

In an Aug. 30, 2005 memo, the team reported overheating graphics chip, cracking heat sinks, cosmetic issues with the hard disk drive and the front of the box, under-performing graphics memory chips from Infineon (now Qimonda), a problem with the DVD drive, and other things.

The test machines were not properly debugged, due to an ill-advised cost-cutting initiative that shaved $2 million from $25 million paid to Cimtek, a test machine maker in Canada. The Microsoft team decided not to pay the consulting fee to Cimtek to build, manage and debug the test machines. Sources familiar with the matter said there were only about 500 test machines at the time of launch, a third of the 1,500 needed.

“There were so many problems, you didn’t know what was wrong,” said one source of the machines. “The [test engineers] didn’t have enough time to get up and running.”

The shortages at launch were in fact largely a product of the Xbox 360's low yields—in Spring 2006, this was the situation:

Microsoft had more than 500,000 defective consoles that sat in warehouses. They were either duds coming out of the factory or they were returned boxes, according to inside sources. The yield was climbing, but far too slowly. The company stood by its statement that returns were within “normal rates for consumer electronics products.”

At that time, the yield rate was still only "an abysmal 50 percent on the first pass. When the bad machines were reworked within the factory, the yield went up to 75 percent –- hardly acceptable." It's gotten better now, but still not amazing. As of the beginning of 2008, it's still only 85 percent—meaning for every 100 Xbox 360s produced, 15 don't work.

The Falcon revision, which used smaller 65nm chips and had a bunch of other tweaks, like more expensive, better quality heatsinks, alleviated some of the problems, as well as made them cheaper to produce—as many had suspected with their introduction. The latest, the Jasper board, takes that a step further, which Takahashi reports is what allowed them to steeply cut console prices last week.

All of this is just a small cut of Takahashi's dense, extremely well-reported feature. If you own an Xbox 360, you owe it to yourself to read. [Venture Beat]

The good news is that when Microsoft said that their red ring problems are fixed on newer units, they were probably right. They went to "an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip." Probably ATI, is what EETimes thinks. Moral of the story is to not skimp on chip design so you can save tens of millions, because that may come back and bite you in the ass down the road. [EETimes]

[Technabob]