Red Ring of Disaster

My Xbox has bought the Red Ring of Death farm.  Again.

I purchased an Elite on the day of release in August 2007, to go with my new HDTV delivered two days before (at the time, the Elite was the only model with an HDMI port).  It first RRoD-ed in April 2008, having choked on Call of Duty Modern Warfare (I had a similar feeling - I'm not a fan of the series).  Just before I bought my 360, Microsoft extended the 360's warranty to  3 years for a 3 red light failure (still only 1 year on anything else that drops off the clown car that is the 360).  Had MS not made that move, I would be well outside my warranty period.

Off to Frankfurt in a cunningly disguised Amazon box - my 360

Back when it failed last time, the repair process, from pick up to return,  took about 4 weeks to complete but Microsoft said 2-3 weeks this time (and the UPS driver that picked it up - and he should know - reckons they generally take only a week).  One bright side of that first failure was that I turned to Resident Evil 4 on GameCube, one of the best games I've ever played.  This time around, I've started playing God of War III on PS3, a reply of  Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on GC (via Wii) and the SNES classic Super Mario Kart on Wii Virtual Console - great games, all.

I don't want to turn this in to a whine against Microsoft (though I fear it will head off down that path), as the internet  is full of those and slagging off the 360's build quality in particular.  I love my 360 - I think it is the best console I've ever owned, with some of the best games I've ever played and certainly the best controller I've ever used - and I think we are currently in what will be looked back on as a golden age of gaming (I also have love for my  PS3, Wii and DS too; PSP, not so much).

The sad, empty, space where my 360 used to be.  I dusted specially.

However, the failure rate of the 360 is abysmal - I know of people that are on their fifth console - and what is worse  is that it is still an issue nearly five years after it was released.  You could possibly excuse Microsoft for the initial failures (if you were being very charitable - it was launched in 2005, not 1975 and QA is reasonably good these days) but Microsoft's own failure to eliminate this problem is lamentable.  The failure rate has undoubtedly declined a lot from the launch models but I don't think that, after this time, any failure rate over a low single figure percent is acceptable for mature hardware.  Even Sir Clive Sinclair (hallowed be his name) managed a lower failure rate on his Sinclair computers.  In some years, anyway.  Possibly.....

When I was growing up in the seventies, televisions were famously unreliable - my family had several that malfunctioned in interesting ways (shrinking the picture down to the size of a postage stamp being my favourite).  Over time (and, frankly,  thanks to increased Japanese imports), televisions became more reliable and I can't now remember the last time one died on me.  Televisions are complicated machines but their failure rate is acceptable.  I see no reason for consoles, which have been around in one form or another since the seventies, should be any different.   One thing's for sure - whenever Microsoft prepares the successor to the 360, it needs to zero in on getting build quality right from day one.