"Acceptable failure rate" of consoles

aceattorney

aceattorney

TXB Join Date: 02/2002
Sep 11, 2013
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I understand any manufactured product will have a fail rate. Anyone know what the fail rate of the Wii U was when it launched? What do you think the fail rate of the X1 will be?

BTW, this thread exists because I don't want to talk about X1 and Wii U anymore in the PS4 fail rate thread.
 
The usual "low end" of failure rates for new advanced electronics devices is between 2-5%. I think the Xbox One will be a bit higher than that though, I'm guessing in the 5-10% range?
 
Well, to look at failure rates you need to look at failures over a set time. The failure rate of every electronic device is 100% over an infinite time frame. ;)
 
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I'd say 4% per batch to be an acceptable rate, and after the RROD crap MS is hypersensitive going into this gen so I am guessing they are trying to make sure that the X1 rate is south of 4%. This is evident by the open air design, huge fan, and built-in redundancies to the SoC
 
Some nerd here pointed out that there is a difference between initial failure rate (essentially DoA) and failure rate over time (e.g., most RRODs took a while to crap out). We can know the first right away, but we won't know the second for a few years. And there are different "acceptable failure rates" for both. So it might be useful to differentiate.
 
Kerosene31 said:
Well, to look at failure rates you need to look at failures over a set time. The failure rate of every electronic device is 100% over an infinite time frame. ;)
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Apparently you've never heard of the Nokia 3310.

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Kerosene31 said:
Well, to look at failure rates you need to look at failures over a set time. The failure rate of every electronic device is 100% over an infinite time frame. ;)
Click to expand...
Yes, but we're talking about failure rates & those are usually recorded in the first 90 days or 1 year time frame. =) Most people that try to sell you extended warranties past a year for a lot of money it's usually not worth it because they fail to tell you that most products that do fail, it's something like 70% fail within the first 90 days. If it's going to fail, it's usually some early defect rather than over time.

Based on what exactly?
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What are you asking again? Usually electronics have an average of 2-5% failure rate for the first year. That's just industry recorded stats. Of course, that's not every device. Some higher, some lower. Xbox 360 had a much higher failure rate, but they tried to throw that system together in roughly two years. The red rings issue was highly reported before the system shipped. Microsoft told the manufacturing facilities to go ahead & ship it though because they had to beat Sony by a year to market & they would, "absorb the loss later." Granted, I'm not sure Microsoft knew how high the failure rate really was. I'm sure the manufacturers lied and/or reported the test systems were failing at a lower rate or gave MS their guess on the failure rate on the low side of things. The true failure rate of the Xbox 360 the first couple of years was reported to be near 25%. That is staggeringly high. Imagine four console sitting on the shelves at launch. One in four of those is going to be sent back for repairs over & over if not more.

Regardless, you have to expect the Xbox One to be a little higher than the average 2-5% since it has a lot going on in it with the three operating systems, etc. I thought it might be in the 5-10% range. You figure 1 in 10 might have problems. I know MS had a lot more time this time around, 8 years compared to 4, they no longer had to beat Sony by a year, & they probably don't want to take that billion dollar loss anymore like they did last time. I'm guessing this system will have features built-in similar to the later model 360's where if it detects problems about to happen, it will ask you to shut down & save, etc.
 
Here's a somewhat interesting study from SquareTrade.. they sell warranties so they get a lot of decent data, and actually release it.

http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_Xbox360_PS3_Wii_Reliability_0809.pdf

They have other stuff on their site.

From what I've read your "Typical" failure rate differs depending on the product. I haven't read much about what is acceptable as a DOA, usually the smallest measurement is "the first 2 years."
 
I expect next gen to have a lower 2 year failure rate than 10% because it's no longer cutting edge parts, but mid-range PC SoCs that consume less watts than launch 360/PS3.

Despite the rumors I don't think Xbox will have a higher than normal defect rate.
 
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