Nazulu said:
EternallyBored said:
It happened, but the gaming press didn't cover it, and the internet was too new to get any idea of when people were getting bricked consoles. They didn't exactly have tech support forums back then, or people posting videos of their systems on Youtube, the only thing you really had was the 1-800 number for the company, so the only people that knew you had a broken system was yourself, and any friends you told.
I bought a Super Nintendo at launch that would never register Audio, returned it to the store after 5 days. A friend of mine got a similar disc grinding noise that the Xbox ones are getting back when he bought a PS1, I guess they might be similar issues in both cases, apparently the grinding was caused by the laser reader getting stuck and not being able to move. My cousin got a defective N64 at launch, the damn thing had a broken power button and wouldn't turn on at all. I knew a number of people that got broken disc readers in their Dreamcasts as well.
Average failure rate for consumer electronics (not just consoles), seems to hover at around 4-6% on average although I think the maximum acceptable rate is around 10%. The number might have gone up a bit in later years, current high performance electronics tend to be a little more fragile on average as there tends to be more points where the entire thing can fail. The modern T.V. is exponentially more complex than an old projection screen T.V. that only has a fraction of the parts (although you did have to worry about the bulb burning out).
No kidding on no cover, because I never heard of it. Though it would make more sense that not every single one would work like it should. I really should've taken into account that the media covers everything now, and even has a bad habit of exaggerating the hell out things.
All I have is my own experience, which is my friends and I never had any problems, and the old consoles all still work perfectly now. Though many people here didn't go through the hell I put up with when I bought the Wii on day one, where I had to take everything back and keep going through maintenance.
Yeah, personal experience is weird that way, I ended up getting a bricked gamecube at launch, and the store was sold out, so I didn't manage to get ahold of another one for about a month. But I never ran into any issues with the 360 and PS3 generation, my launch 360 ran like a champ for 5 years before I replaced it with an elite, and my PS3 is still chugging along with the old 60GB backwards compatible model, My PS4 has been working well so far too.
I do know some friends that ran into the 360 RROD problem, that issue was so pervasive I think it has made people hyper-sensitive to console hardware failure. We once used to just accept when we got defective hardware and returned it or had it repaired, you would see posts in places about people trying to fix their system, but it never quite got much coverage, because the media seemed to recognize that the occasional defect or failure was nothing to get worried about. Then the 360 came along, and seemed to have an initial failure rate that was 3 to 4 times higher than the usual upper range, some estimates put entire production runs of the 360 at 50% failure rate. You started hearing stories about people who went through four or five 360s before getting a console that worked, and Microsoft eventually implemented a policy to fix or replace any 360s experiencing the problem completely free of charge with no time limits.
Now I think everyone wants to jump on any failure as the next Red Ring of Death, even this topic is using the term green screen of death to try and compare the Xbox One to its infamous predecessor. In some weird way, people want to see another spectacular blowup like that, it's like watching a train wreck in slow motion, you know it's wrong, but you just can't look away. People start to jump on any hardware issue in hopes of seeing another debacle, or in fear that they are going to end up going through half a dozen different consoles before getting one to work like last time.
Like I said above though, I wouldn't be surprised if the failure rate of some of the earlier consoles was indeed lower on average, if you've ever torn apart an SNES and looked inside, then compared it to a 360 or PS3, you quickly realize that the newer generations have a lot more components. Not to mention the greater power requirements, the necessary heat sinks that the older consoles didn't need, the greater number of different hardware in general, and the number of ways a console can break start to add up. The older consoles tended to be more robust because they were simple, the SNES runs quiet and cold, not because it's better designed or better made, but because the hardware inside is simple and doesn't require much power to run. The newer generations would melt down in conditions that the SNES or N64 could run just fine in, but that's not Sony or Microsoft's fault, the more powerful your hardware, the more energy you require, the more energy required, the hotter your system is going to run, the hotter the system runs, the more stress you put on the hardware itself.
