Microsoft Sued Over Red Ring of Death

[exfileme]

Apparently, a lawsuit against Microsoft exists in the Sacramento County Superior Court, alleging that an excessive number of Xbox 360 consoles have failed.

Microsoft Sued Over Red Ring of Death : Read more

 

[Pei-chen]

Wow, I think PC, with more complex hardwares, has lower failure rate than XBOX 360.

 

[chaohsiangchen]

^
Agree, and not to mention that you can fix it when it just piss and die.

 

[NuclearShadow]

I think Microsoft deserves to be sued over this. Its clear that they pushed out defective hardware with full knowledge. They are very lucky that consumers nowadays don't seem to care to much about the quality of things. I can guarantee you that if this failure rate was in one of the older consoles the console would have been a complete failure.

 

[blackened144]

I dont know about a lot of these failures.. My friend complained when his first died.. I was at his house and he showed me the sealed cabinet that he kept it in.. It had to be almost 150 degrees in there, but he kept protesting that had nothing to do with it.. I helped him remove the front glass door and the backing to the cabinet, and his new 360 has been alive over 2 years.. Im sure there are a few unit that are flat out defective, but Im sure there's more than a few that are end user related.

 

[Guest]

This is not going to fly, because they are fixing them for free. If this came, before they had the replacement program in place, then they would be in a lot of crap.

 

[techtre2003]

I'm sure not providing adequate cooling definitely shortened the life of a lot of those consoles; but I'm sure that a lot of them were defective. I myself am on my third xbox. The first was an ebay purchase so no surprise it failed after 2 weeks. The second one died after about 50 hours of 1 hour or so gaming sessions. My current one has about 20 hours on it, and it's already red ringed on me twice and has come back to life. I'm just waiting on it to die permanently. I keep the xbox on top of an entertainment stand (totally open) away from the wall and any other electronics and it still gets hot and has the fan running constantly. They just aren't designed to dissipate the heat they generate.
What I found funny about the article is that the lawsuit calls for Microsoft to "disgorge all profits attributable to its sale of the Xbox 360". Am I wrong or haven't they lost quite a bit of money on the 360?

 

[Guest]

I think this is just speculation, a bit of conspiracy theory, and anti-MS to say they intentionally pushed out defective hardware. Over the last 25 years I have worked for several consumer electronics companies and they generally do not intentionally do this. Problems do come up, it takes time to fix and flush the manufacturing, distribution, and sales channels. MS and any other company know the real cost of problems like the ring of death and know that it cannot be just swept under the rug – if there is anything they can do to fix it they will.

I did personally have this happen to my 360. I called them and had a new one within 10 days. The support calls where the best I have ever experienced, no questions asked they sent me a box to pack it, picked it up, and sent me a new one. It was an inconvenience and I wish their quality control/testing caught the problem initially, but MS handled this better than any other consumer electronics company I have experienced. This just sometimes happens with complex consumer electronics – I just don’t think many of the people complaining about this to the point of lawsuit really understand this.

 

[techtre2003]

I agree with Blah; I don't think MS knew they had defective hardware and pushed it out anyway. The cost to repair all of these systems is substantial and I'm sure a huge headache.
My return experience was also very quick and smooth. They also sent me a free 3 month gold subscription with my new (refurbished) xbox. It's just kind of annoying that I've had to do it twice already and am anticipating doing it again very soon. It's really frustrating to get a console back that was manufactured before my previous one that has been "refurbished" to last another 3-6 months. Why not send me a new unit that has the new motherboard and 65nm chip so maybe it will last a few years?
With that being said, I still wouldn't consider suing the company over this. I mean really, $5 million because your xbox quit? Get real. I'll just be much more hesitant to buy Microsoft when the next group of consoles come around.

 

[Guest]

Tom's sucks at reporting... "Apparently, the company knew about the problem as far back as November 2005" give me a break... While that may be true, a REAL journalist would say Allegedly, because it hasn't exactly been proven yet... give me a break, do we live in America or Russia?

 

[Guest]

So... the free three year warranty isn't good enough? Some people are just out to try and make a buck. If you console fails you get it replaced for free... why, again, are you suing?

Of course some crap like this would come from the worst run state in America, California. Someone please kick those hippies out of the union.

 

[TwoDigital]

Microsoft is already producing these consoles at a huge loss (hoping to make up the cost in game profits to at least break even eventually...) I wish people would be more realistic with lawsuits. Seriously, "$5 million in damages and to force Microsoft to repair all damaged consoles for free." ?!?!? They're already fixing them for free, why should Jim Dorkmeier not be laughed out of court in his seeking that kind of money for a broken GAME SYSTEM that was replaced with a working one.

It makes me wonder... how many of these stupid putative damage lawsuits would these shifty attorneys file if we created a federal (U.S.) statute that they can only collect their fee on the actual damages portion of the settlement and not any collected putative damages?

 

[TwoDigital]

The point I was making at selling the consoles at a loss... if lawsuits like this one keep going, Microsoft will just exit the market. While I personally don't care and don't have an Xbox, I'm sure others would not want to have to pick between just a Wii2 and a PS4 in the next round.

 

[noobe1981]

This happened to my brother a bit to lol. He had one dead red, and it was after warranty. Went and bought another one and the same day he bought it. It got a red ring of death. Thats just sad.

This suit is stictly legit, and needed. And to two microsoft isn't getting of the market anytime soon. Their still making crap loads of money. And when they know its their fault they'll just have to do it right next time if they feel as though they can't get away with defective crap again.

 

[xnio]

I am from Ecuador, my brother was in USA, when he was there, we decided to buy a game console, we got two options, XBOX or PS3, before read a lot of histories about RROD, we bougth a PS3, that thing goes really good. MS needs to resolve this problem urgent!!!

 

[davidgbailey]

For anyone thinking that Microsoft did it on purpose, as much as they most assuredly suck, fixing things for free kills profits. It's just far too expensive to be plausible. I'd like to see the actual cost accrued so far for the repairs.

 

[TwoDigital]

Noobe: I do feel bad for your brother and given the history, MS should have repaired/replaced if for no other reason than to have him spend money on games rather than a new system. That absolutely sucks that he had that happen.

Microsoft still loses money on each Xbox360 they sell... quarterly losses for the "Entertainment and Devices Division" that produces the Xbox hardware have been decreasing according to their financial reports, but they are still running at a loss as of 2Q08. They're in the market to be IN THE MARKET and not for the crap loads of money that people assume they must be making on the deal. Info is from their last quarterly statement.

 

[gto127]

I have a repair business and have repaired these for people that did not want to wait for microsoft warranty. The problem was a heatsink that was too small for the amount of heat generated by the GPU coupled with insufficent airflow over this processor. The constant overheating then cooling would cause solder balls to crack and or seperate from the main board when the board warps. The newer design is much better as it has heat pipe and epoxy to hold the gpu to the board. Just make sure you don't set 360 on its side as this can work against the heatpipe and still cause failure. I wouldn't be afraid to purchase one of these now-much better design.

 

[DXRick]

[citation][nom]tcr071[/nom]So... the free three year warranty isn't good enough? Some people are just out to try and make a buck. If you console fails you get it replaced for free... why, again, are you suing?Of course some crap like this would come from the worst run state in America, California. Someone please kick those hippies out of the union. [/citation]

Dude! We voted the Govenator back in, and many of us are now yuppies .

And yes, like every other state, we have far more lawyers than we need.

 

[LkS]

Xboxes are cheap pieces of crap and I hope MS fails in this market. A world without xbox would be a better place. Maybe some PC franchises would actually be made as proper PC games again instead of all the boring dumbed down Xbox-PC co-developed rubbish we get today.