Well remember, we live in an age where everything is LITERALLY designed to be tossed out as soon the option is viable. By shortening the lives of these machines, these companies make TONS of money in replacement and repair.
Something about the current generation of Consoles has been bugging me
- Thread starter Warforger
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The only problems I have with my Xbox are the freezes (eevry conule has them at some point) and my two most played games are breaking a little bit in the inner circle where it it clear. They both work, but they are definetely cracked. No problems with my Wii, just have not got it hooked up to the interwebs since I moved.
I have always taken pride in my Wii and 360. I don't leave games out. I don't let anything damage them. The only bad thing I do is fall asleep with Netfliz on the 360, but it works just fine.
I have always taken pride in my Wii and 360. I don't leave games out. I don't let anything damage them. The only bad thing I do is fall asleep with Netfliz on the 360, but it works just fine.
In the case of the 360, Microsoft rushed an unfinished, insufficiently tested product to market in order to grab market share, knowing that it might cost them literally billions of dollars to replace the defective consoles, but counting on the idea that enough people would buy them anyway to give them an upper hand in this generation's console war.
And for the most part it worked; the lead time gave Microsoft a substantial advantage in install base versus the PS3 that launched a year later. Most of that ground has been made up by now, but it still paid off for Microsoft in some ways.
For the PS3 {and to an extent the Wii), for the most part it's simply a matter of a lot of heat, and a sub-optimal setup for getting rid of it. Not blatantly defective like the first 360s were, but not as robust as it would be if, for example, Sony had abandoned design aesthetic in favor of cooling efficiency.
And for the most part it worked; the lead time gave Microsoft a substantial advantage in install base versus the PS3 that launched a year later. Most of that ground has been made up by now, but it still paid off for Microsoft in some ways.
For the PS3 {and to an extent the Wii), for the most part it's simply a matter of a lot of heat, and a sub-optimal setup for getting rid of it. Not blatantly defective like the first 360s were, but not as robust as it would be if, for example, Sony had abandoned design aesthetic in favor of cooling efficiency.
The original xbox did have a problem It could not be played for more than 12 hours without crashing. Actually had it happen to me while playing kotor and the first ps2's were well known to clog up with dust and overheat, something to do with a poor vent design Sony fixed it in the next build. The ps 1's were well known to cook themselves and early European N64's had a faulty fuse that actually lead to a few people getting electrocuted. Also my mega cd cause's my megadrive to really overheat. Tech has problems always has.
It was bad for the cartridges, but that's not the reason the NES had so many problems. The frontloading NES had a fatal design flaw in the way the cartridge had to be inserted. Specifically, every time you press down on a cartridge to lock it into place, you're actually bending the connector that reads the cartridge. Eventually, it gets bent out of shape badly enough that it either can't make the connection at all, or it's really difficult to get it to connect. The spit from blowing on it basically made the contacts thicker, and gave it a better chance of being read, but carried the risk or corroding the contacts. This was all over the internet around 2004, when kits became available to replace the connector. I've been meaning to buy one for years, but I'm not comfortable performing surgery on my first console; I've got too many good memories of that thing to risk breaking it worse than it's already broken.zehydra said:
It's not necessarily that the NES used better components or anything of the sort. It's the difference between millimeters and nanometers. There's ten-thousand-fold more tech packed into an equivalent space between a NES and a 360/PS3. The new tech is an inherently more massive machine on all levels. Tolerances get tight and there's almost no room for error. Even the tiniest discrepancies can cause massive failures when you're working so small.
Not to mention all the bells and whistles packed into these things-- these consoles do things that my friends and I only envisioned as dreams of some sci-fi future that was, to us, incredibly unlikely at the time. The more features you expect these things to bring forth, the greater the chance that something somewhere is going to act up.
And any of us who have spent the better part of a day figuring out why our PC is just randomly blinking out knows that no tech is truly safe from this kind of behavior. The more complicated it gets, the more chance there is that something is going to spring eventually.
There's some sort of inexplicable gap I can't explain. There's some people that expect tech to work at all times, and those that expect their inevitable freak-out as a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, these camps seem interchangeable, depending on exactly what's broken....
Not to mention all the bells and whistles packed into these things-- these consoles do things that my friends and I only envisioned as dreams of some sci-fi future that was, to us, incredibly unlikely at the time. The more features you expect these things to bring forth, the greater the chance that something somewhere is going to act up.
And any of us who have spent the better part of a day figuring out why our PC is just randomly blinking out knows that no tech is truly safe from this kind of behavior. The more complicated it gets, the more chance there is that something is going to spring eventually.
There's some sort of inexplicable gap I can't explain. There's some people that expect tech to work at all times, and those that expect their inevitable freak-out as a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, these camps seem interchangeable, depending on exactly what's broken....
My guess is that they have so many bugs because the developers wanted to realease their consoles at the same time to avoid having ther competitors get ahead in the game.
Hence they rushed the production of the consoles and left them with all these issues that had to be sorted out afterwards.
Hence they rushed the production of the consoles and left them with all these issues that had to be sorted out afterwards.
Every time you add something to a device you increase the number of things that can go wrong. The more complicated it gets, the more faults that will emerge. Though Microsoft never built the Xbox or 360 properly to begin with.
I've never owned a NES but back when it was still a supported console I'd play it at some friends' houses who'd have to try very hard to get the stupid thing to start (reinserting cartridges repeatedly). My Mega Drive, SNES and N64 barely work anymore. My first PS2 died and I had to get it replaced just a couple of years after I bought it. My Gamecube's laser was always a bit faulty and sometimes would crash the games I was playing. I don't own a 360 so I can't account for how bad its reliability is, but my PS3's been working perfectly (other than some software issues) since I got it. Even with the 360's poor reliability I don't think that on the whole this generation's hardware is any less reliable than those previous.
That's a bit like saying "cars are so unreliable these days, I don't remember the Model T breaking down!" They only overheat and crash because we expect much more of them than we used to.
Don't know about the YLoD, but the RRoD usually accompanies an error code that, when looked up, tells you what went wrong. I fixed my RRoD in all of ten minutes this way.TheComedown said:
You realise RRoD and YLoD (I think) are just caused by the respective consoles overheating? Thinking a computer can't be damaged in this way is "straight up ignorance and stupidity". Anything that can happen to a 360 or a PS3 could happen to a computer, because that's all they are.TheComedown said:
Well, that and the fact that horizontal insertion allows dust to collect on the connectors, which can cause bad connections even when everything else is in working order (thus the need for cleaning kits) - the most notable problem here being dirty security chip pins (if the security chip in the NES isn't receiving the data it expects from the one in the cartridge, it proceeds to reset the console once a second).Owyn_Merrilin said:
As far as bending the pins, it's mostly to do with the fact that the pins themselves are quite long and soft (ultimately, each pin is a roughly 6-inch long strip of nickel - the length is necessary to accommodate the unusual 'U' shape of the connector) and thus far more prone to deformation than the 1/4-inch-long brass connectors used in most cartridge sockets. (The 'U' shape itself is required because of the front-loading design.)
The game genie didn't help matters, either - the game genie PCB was significantly thicker than normal game PCBs, putting the connector pins under more strain and causing them to bend faster.
On the other hand, at least it's cheap and easy to replace the connector - all it takes is a Phillips screwdriver, a special $5 screwdriver tip and a <$10 replacement connector. (The connector isn't soldered on to the NES motherboard; instead, the motherboard has its own edge connector that fits into a socket on the underside of the cartridge, with two screw mounts to secure the connector to the lower console shell. If you can use a screwdriver and insert and remove cartridges you already have all the skills you need to replace the connector.)
And frankly, it's still better than the Famicom Disk System, wherein the drive belt has an annoying tendency to snap.
All of this, of course, is irrelevant with the redesigned NES-101, which removes the lock-out chip and is top-loaded - though that version has it's own flaws, in particular the removal of the composite video connector. (Though that can be added - but it's a riskier and more complicated mod than replacing the cart connector.)
