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So my 360 died. Again. 3 Times Now.
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Did I just get really lucky or what?
Apparently, very lucky indeed! It seems you have found the rarest of products, the near-extinct: exboxus imperviousi. Rejoice in your fortune!
If he followed the crazy "X game" logic it would be "The 300 trailer bricked my 360".
Quick! Someone tell Kotaku, Joystiq, and MaxConsole!
this
Not exactly a real thunderous admission of error... and I am surprised that they are giving any credence at all to that Kassa "test." How about an admission (or even just a "well, maybe") about the hardware issues? No? Darn.
Edit: looks like its a Benq-drive reader so its not release at least.
Date of Manufature should be on the back below (above?) your serial number. It doesn't show a hardware rev. number, but there's probably a resource on the internets that might show the rev by date of manufacture.
Depends entirely on whether xbox breakages are independent events or not. E.g. if having a broken xbox meant you were more likely to have a second broken xbox because of a dodgy shipment in the area, or incorrect repairs or the home user is an animal etc then being on your 4th xbox might not be that statistically unlikely.
For statistics you cant make any reliable numbers since Microsoft keeps a tight lip about customer return issues & numbers.
Extending the warranty is a good move but should not have been needed in the first place. (For each change made to product after release you use a factor of ten(!), the exploding batteries in laptops is a good example of this).
My guess is that the "repairs" do not repair the main issues at all which is a major fuck-up by the microsoft repair unit/company.
(For customer care you (can) use a scale which is given points depending on how serious the issue is along with how noticeable it is for the customer (forgot what the 3rd number is).
Then you multiply those 3 numbers to get a sum to compare it to other issues. (A bricked unit is almost as bad as it gets, only worse is if a issue ends up injuring the customer)).
(Edit: there was a manufacturer date on the backplate, I must be going blind or something).
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
The bolded section reflects the primary difficulty in arriving at a statistically reliable analysis. If we knew, with some certainty:
-the number of 360s manufactured
-the hardware failure rate on those items
-the number of refurb (or repaired) 360s distributed, and
-the hardware failure rates on those units,
then we could determine the statistical probability of getting a bad box. Plus, we would then have to know if the factors raised by Rook, above, play into things. THEN we could look at where an individual lives and what his/her odds are of getting a bad unit (let alone my bad three :P ).
[cynicism]Of course, if we knew how much money MS was making on these products (in terms of the repair/replace fee), we might have a more honest reason why other numbers might be so high.[/cynicism]
Unless Microsoft releases that information, then there's no real way to know the extent of the problem. Hey, if MS comes forward with certified documents showing a 2% failure rate, then I am just a guy with some seriously bad luck. I beleive, however, that accurate info in this regard will likely never really be forthcoming, unless there is a real lawsuit that forces Microsoft to disclose its numbers. I also happen to believe that I couldn't possibly be that unlucky, but am probably totally wrong on that.
Sorry, missed one part of the original question: with a failure rate of 5%, the percentage chance that an individual can receive 3 bad xboxes in a row is simply 5% * 5% * 5%, for a chance of (wait for it):
0.0125%
Or, about one in 8000 (if quick brain math serves).
Could I possibly be that unlucky? If my next one fails (assuming the 5% failure rate, the high end of MS' estimates), the numbers change a whole lot more:
0.0006%, or about one in 160,000... Look at me! I could almost be a lottery winner!
No doubt but that is the way most companies do things. Some companies have a no lemon policy but I don't think MS does, which is too bad. These hardware issues are hurting the 360's image more than anything else. It is too late to turn the image around all the way, too. Of course it didn't seem to hurt the PS2 all that much, I knew multiple people who claimed to have gotten busted 5 PS2s over the years. These weren't friends just customers.
Not exactly... probability math is tough (for me) to explain. As an example, let's say the failure rate is 5%; that doesn't mean that if I buy 100 360s, I will end up with exactly 5 bad units. Might be 0, might be 45. The numbers I used are probabilities. As another example, if your odds of winning a lottery are 1 in 100,000, just buying 100,000 tickets doesn't guarantee the win.
I am probably doing a lousy job of explaining this, and I apologize, but it is more likely/probable (unless the bad box rate is way higher!!) that the bad boxes are being distributed more evenly. For example: it is more likely that you will get one bad box than two bad boxes.
As a final "clarification" (which probably is as confusing as the rest of the crap I've written), 0.0125% is the percentage chance of any one person getting three bad boxes, as with the lottery example, it might be the case that NO ONE has received three bad boxes. However, I can assure you that this is not the case ;-) :x
edited for anger
If my chances of winning a lottery are 1 in 100,000, and there are 100,000 possible combinations of numbers, buying 100,000 tickets guarantee me the win.
raise your hand if your PS1 only worked upside down
Hey, Lewie, go find four people.
Ask them if they've got the clap.
If they don't, go scrub real, real hard.
One of them did.
Dip that shit in lye man.
Correct, where the number of possible combinations is static. But knowing the number of possible combinations, and covering every one, is not, with all due respect, "probability" (which is selecting a number of times from a larger pool of possible outcomes). It is "certainty" (which is selecting a number of times equal to the number of items in that pool).
To carry that logic over: in order to align with your lottery example, you would, in order to guarantee getting all of the the 5% number of bad units, have to buy every single 360. The "whole pool." However, we are dealing with a more typical example of reaching into a a big box of ... er, boxes... and grabbing three of them out (out of what, 8 million or so?). The probability of pulling three bad boxes is, in fact (based on a 5% failure rate), 0.0125%. And as this is a probability (because you are not pulling them all*), there is no actual "certainty" that precisely (the number of units sold) * 0.0125% will get tell you how many people will get 3 bad units.
As another (surprisingly better) example: Flip a coin. There is a 50/50 chance that you will get heads. Now flip it twice. Unfortunately, you cannot generate a condition of certainty, only a probability that if it's flipped twice, you will get heads twice (25%), but no certainty. Now say if you get 3 friends and all 4 of you flip a coin twice, there is not a 100% certainty that one of you will get two heads, only a probability of 25% that any one of you will get 2 heads.
*(hence, "probability" and not "certainty")
Man, that was way shorter than my explanation. And I think that 2 out of 3 of us actually understood it. ;-)
I tutored for a psych/ecology statistics class one time. One night, exactly 25 people showed up for it, so I used that example to illustrate everything that you just said.
"Given that, five of you have the clap. Now, please stand up if you actually do have the clap."
(puzzled looks, no takers, but one girl came to me after class to inform me that she did actually have the clap)
"Good, now that you all understand, open up to chapter 2."
As far as Slutty McFratwhore, she failed out.
How many of the 360s that have been manufactured have sold?
I would have to say that the distinction in definitions between certainty and probability is, kind of, you know, defining. But I won't belabour the point any further.
Wonder: I believe 8 million or so units have been sold.
phew, my girlfriend is safe
My number was based on an article several months old. I would think that wikipedia's numbers are probably closer to the truth.
Snake, you've created a paradox.
I just wish we could do anything other than guesswork, taking Microsoft's claims that refurbished and repaired consoles have no greater likelihood of breaking than new ones, using their 1-5% figures. My 360 isn't even broken and I'm trying to track down my receipt just in case.
I know at least 3 people who are going to get a 360 for that when it launches.
Still, didnt peter moore say they would sell 20 million by start of 2008. That seems a little ludicrous.
I was asking because we can't be certain about the failure rates. What would be a safe estimate of total number of 360 manufactured? Maybe twice the sold total, if I were to completely make up a number based on no information whatsoever. That means that we can't know how many in the hands of consumers will fail. Who knows, every single 360 that will fail (barring things like hardware updates, operating on the simplest math possible) may have ended up in the hands of consumers already, and that none of those that are sitting on shelves waiting to be sold will fail.
Just numbers and speculation 'sall.
猿も木から落ちる
- Michael Scott
yes and most companies do that with their products. I know Samsung send you a refurbished unit unless you specifically ask that they fix your unit. Same for HP printers.
But usually this applies to companies that give you an advance exchange option meaning that they sent you a refurbished unit and then you send in your broken unit. The other option is the repair route which they will send you back the same unit unless there was a major problem.