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]

From Redmond, via Kotaku:

While the majority of Xbox 360 owners continue to have a great experience with their console, we are aware that a very small percentage of our customers have reported receiving an error that displays "E74" on their screen. After investigating the issue, we have determined that the E74 error message can indicate the general hardware failure that is associated with three flashing red lights error on the console. As a result, we have decided to cover repairs related to the E74 error message under our three-year warranty program for certain general hardware failures that was announced in July 2007.

Apparently the program will also reimburse anyone who previously paid for E74 repairs. Having to address another hardware fiasco may further solidify the Xbox 360's reputation as a comically goof-prone console, but at least Microsoft is doing their users right on this one. [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]

Note: Don't take it seriously. It's just a funny image I thought I'd pass along.

I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.

Take the iPhone, for example, one of the most successful products in the history of consumer electronics. We like it, I love mine, but the fact is that the first generation was rushed out, lacking basic features that were added in later releases or are not here yet. Worse: The iPhone 3G was really broken. For real. Bad signal, dropped calls, frozen apps. This would have been unthinkable in cellphones just five years ago. They were simpler, for sure, but they were failure proof. Today's engineering and testing is a lot more sophisticated. In theory, products can't go out into distribution with such glaring problems undetected.

Another recent example is my iMac 24, which had the infamous video card problem out of the box. How can a machine with such an obvious problem—instantly detected by the user base—be sold like that? The same happened recently with Nvidia video boards. In fact, graphic cards—being always in the cutting edge of technology—are perfect examples of beta hardware being sold as final hardware, with many released with beta-quality drivers and requiring firmware patches.

From that to the now-universally-accepted Blue Screen of Death, from buggy Blu-ray players to the Xbox 360's red ring of death and PS3's bugs, even from kitchen ovens to faulty DSLR cameras, the list of troubled products is endless. Just this week, the eagerly anticipated BlackBerry Storm launched to mixed reviews, in part because of its crashy, apparently unfinished software.

On the other side, my parents have a Telefunken CRT TV and a Braun radio from the '70s which are still in working condition. They were first generation. They never failed. Compare that to my first plasma TV from Philips, which broke after less than a year of use. Mine wasn't the only one. The technology was too young to be released; it was still in beta state. Philips wanted to be the first in the world with a flat TV and beat the competition, so they released it. This probably wasn't a good move: Today, Philips' TV business is struggling, and is nonexistent in the US. Meanwhile, my Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Apple IIe from the 1980s still work like they did from day one, perfectly.

For sure, today's products are far more complex than those of 20 or 30 years ago. But back then, the manufacturing was also a lot worse. It was less automated, often purely manual, and imperfect. Today, in a world where automated factories run 24/7, there's less chance of error. Yet still, there are countless problems in the final products, and those problems affect every unit in an entire model line. In the age of manufacturing perfection, there are still major recalls concerning products that burn or break.

Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear.

Who's to blame? Google and their web apps? Apple and their iPhone 3G problems? Microsoft and their countless buggy versions of operating systems and the Xbox 360's RROD? Philips? Sony? Samsung? LG? We all are. The manufacturers, who are driven by a thirst to expand and satisfy their shareholders at all costs. The consumers, who are so thirsty to drink in the shiniest, newest technology that they are willing to sacrifice stability. And the press too, who pours more gasoline onto the consumerism bonfire by writing glowing reviews and often minimizing things that are simply not acceptable.

Personally, I'm tired of all this. But I'm mostly tired about the fact that it seems that we all have given up. Tired because now we see "upgrades" as an opportunity to protect our investment, but in reality, it's laziness and a poor job on the manufacturer part that we have accepted without questioning. Instead of calling foul play and refusing to participate, we keep buying.

That's the key: We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don't know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades.

Maybe the recession will put some order in this thirst of new stuff and change the product cycles. As the economy slows down, people will think twice before buying the latest and greatest; they'll keep older hardware for longer. Then, manufacturers will have to rethink their product lines, and lift their feet from the accelerator, which will result on slower cycles and better products. Maybe that's our ticket for better electronics that actually make sense.

Or maybe... maybe that will be another excuse for the manufacturer to cut even more corners and keep lowering prices so that consumers keep spending and ending up with worse products than we have now.

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%

The lawsuit alleges that Microsoft knew around 50% of the consoles shipped were defective. To be quite honest, there are plenty of reports out there that claim the figure is even higher than that. I highly doubt that anything will ever come of this, but I am surprised that it took this long for a lawsuit to develop. I mean, there are probably very few Xbox 360 owners out there that have not taken advantage of the beefed up replacement plan once or twice already. [DailyGamesNews via Kotaku]

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]

[Technabob]

The Ulysses was the first spacecraft to ever pass over the north and south poles of the Sun, but amazing feats of pole to pole traveling were nothing compared to the three comet tails it successfully navigated. The lessons scientists have learnt regarding solar wind and interstellar dust have proven to be invaluable. Unfortunately then, the circuitry has now become defective, which means there is no way to supply power to the machinery that prevents the hydrazine power source from freezing. Once the hydrazine falls below the 2° Celsius freezing point, it's going to be game over for old Ulysses, as there will be no way to control the sky skipper. We imagine it's showing a RROD as we speak, which makes us unbearably sad. We just wanted to say thanks for all the indispensable scientific information, great times, good laughs and the terrific name. Cheers, you will be missed, Ulysses. [New Scientist]

Q: How much more reliable are the current generation of Xbox 360 than the previous designs? Original Xenon, Zypher and Falcon. I've heard that the failure rates for the current design is sub 10%. Much much better, but still too high imoh. And those designs haven't seen much life yet, so no one knows if that failure rate will hold.

We've got incredible reliability on the new work we've done...Our commitment is that it will be the most reliable video game box out there. People really love the Xbox because of the content, but we've got to make sure that the hardware never stands in the way of that.