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IGN's on their defective PS4 [Up: Sony - less than 0.4% of shipped units affected]

RayMaker

Banned
Myself pre-GAF:

No big deal, all electronics have some failures

Myself after-GAF:

OMG, WTF Sony you cant even produce reliable hardware, who cares about GDDR5 and 1.84tflops if your dam consoles dont work.
 
20% failure rate confirmed
smh

Ya can't save them all Shem, lol.

I can tell you one thing, WHEN (not if, WHEN) XB1 units start failing too, as is the case with ALL consumer electronics because some failures are expected and nearly unavoidable with all that silicon, they're going to get crucified in the context of all their PR stumbles up till now.

Sony's just lucky they had a lot of positive vibes before all this 'under-the-microscope' launch madness.

They'll both have failures, and the world will still turn. And ya know what? Even if either approaches RRoD levels of destruction, my extended warranties will keep me warm at night lol.

On a side note, talking about failures with all that silicon for some reason made me think of botched breast implants....
 

The Cowboy

Member
N.B. the standard consumer electronics failure rate is 5%.

I'm going to chalk this up to launching in the age of social media for now. Although, it's always good to be wary as well.

This is most likely the key factor of the situation, due to how popular SM is now things like this spread fast and make it look a lot worse than it actually is. I'd bet money if SM was like it is now back when the Megadrive and SNEs launched, you'd have a similar situation.

Is it bad that some units are failing, sure it is, but this is electronic hardware so some failing units is to be expected. Remember for instance, HDD alone have a failure rate of 5%, and these devices (PS4/Xbox One) all have a HDD in them.
 

Alienous

Member
Only 8 of 4000? Sure, i'm wondering how many cases are not being reported by the users.

You have to consider the fact that the Taco Bell-thing would have attracted 'gamers' (the type of people who would go onto gaming forums).

You also have to consider there would be quite a few, if not a majority of the systems, going to the 'casuals'.

But day 1 failure of as many systems as have failed, from people who are connected to gaming forums (a minority of the total Taco Bell consoles in the wild), is certainly worrying.
 

Nestunt

Member
Ya can't save them all Shem, lol.

I can tell you one thing, WHEN (not if, WHEN) XB1 units start failing too, as is the case with ALL consumer electronics because some failures are expected and nearly unavoidable with all that silicon, they're going to get crucified in the context of all their PR stumbles up till now.

Sony's just lucky they had a lot of positive vibes before all this 'under-the-microscope' launch madness.

They'll both have failures, and the world will still turn. And ya know what? Even if either approaches RRoD levels of destruction, my extended warranties will keep me warm at night lol.

On a side note, talking about failures with all that silicon for some reason made me think of botched breast implants....

I think its premature to call it natural or call it a disaster

nobody knows the percentage

and even more, nobody knows what a console will look like after, say, 2 months of daily usage
 

Ganondolf

Member
N.B. the standard consumer electronics failure rate is 5%.

I'm going to chalk this up to launching in the age of social media for now. Although, it's always good to be wary as well I suppose.

a product has a warranty of 1 year in the uk. these (few) machines have gone faulty in a couple of days. the working ones could go faulty in a month or two.

by the end of the warranty period it could easily pass 20% if there is a manufacturing problem involved.
 

gembel

Member
whos to blame? foxconn workers, foxconn managers, foxconn quality controllers or sony quality controllers?

all of the above
 

SmokedMeat

Gamer™
And this is why I never buy consoles at launch

You never know. It was years before Microsoft got the RROD situation solved. Have we all forgotten the various motherboards that were hopefully going to fix the problem? How to tell if you were buying a Phoenix motherboard console by looking at the numbers on the console? How to tell if you had a Jasper unit?

Fun times.
 
a product has a warranty of 1 year in the uk. these (few) machines have gone faulty in a couple of days. the working ones could go faulty in a month or two.

by the end of the warranty period it could easily pass 20% if there is a manufacturing problem involved.
Maybe it will be 100% in a year and it's part of an insidious scheme of planned one-year obsolescence.

...

rolleyes.gif
 

HariKari

Member
reported

there are a lot of those 4000 that did not report saying their console was fine

It's not safe to assume that. There are also likely more than 4,000 PS4s out in the wild when you factor in the press and whatnot. Even if you double the amount of incidents, 0.2-0.4% failure rate is pretty good for a mass produced piece of hardware. Compare that to the 360 or PS3, and I think it's more than reasonable. For reference, MS said the 360 did 3-5%, officially.
 
It's not safe to assume that. There are also likely more than 4,000 PS4s out in the wild when you factor in the press and whatnot. Even if you double the amount of incidents, 0.2-0.4% failure rate is pretty good for a mass produced piece of hardware. Compare that to the 360 or PS3, and I think it's more than reasonable.

Also all the demo units in places like gamestop and bestbuy that are on all day getting used
 

Nestunt

Member
It's not safe to assume that. There are also likely more than 4,000 PS4s out in the wild when you factor in the press and whatnot. Even if you double the amount of incidents, 0.2-0.4% failure rate is pretty good for a mass produced piece of hardware. Compare that to the 360 or PS3, and I think it's more than reasonable.

I am not saying that those numbers are not correct

the way they were calculated is not

its biased towards information available

which is a mistake because, i dont know, one month? of usage of this consoles (and such a small number compared to the ones that will be in circulation by January 1st 2014) is not an informative sample
 

Ganondolf

Member
It's not safe to assume that. There are also likely more than 4,000 PS4s out in the wild when you factor in the press and whatnot. Even if you double the amount of incidents, 0.2-0.4% failure rate is pretty good for a mass produced piece of hardware. Compare that to the 360 or PS3, and I think it's more than reasonable. For reference, MS said the 360 did 3-5%, officially.

even the xbox360 did not break within a couple of days. hopefully it is caused by sometime silly, best case scenario is the update which can be fixed or the hdmi port which is just on a single batch and not a design fault which would effect almost all of them like the xbox360 (launch version).
 

HariKari

Member
its biased towards information available

And you can just as easily make the argument that the data is only coming in because PS4s failing is a big deal, and people want to make noise about it. Not saying that this is MS astroturfing or anything, but anyone making a stink about their PS4 not working is going to get serious attention. How many people were watching that twitch stream? Exactly.

You could triple the failure rate from what we have sampled so far and it would be a win for Sony over past generations. Does it look good right now? Well, no, not to the 'sky is falling' crowd. But if you look at comparable devices, it's pretty golden.

No one wants to get a PS4 that is DOA. It's brand new, you spent money, you want something that works. But we're dealing with a mass produced piece of hardware here. It's going to happen. XB1 will have problems, I assure you.
 
you only hear of console issues at launch on most ocassions. if 8/4000 PS3s today had issues you would never have a thread on GAF even though PS3 is a 7 year old hardware now. The newer the console launch the more people will report the negative. just like Tesla stocks tanked because a guy drove his ONE car into a tree and it caught fire and shareholders became worried the tesla can catch fire (no shit!).

Unless the failure rate is more than 15% this is all noise and expected with any new hardware and even 7 year old hardware. The difference is , 7 years on 8/4000 consoles having issues will have people on GAF saying 'thats normal for any console'
 

skc

Banned
whos to blame? foxconn workers, foxconn managers, foxconn quality controllers or sony quality controllers?

all of the above

So this will be unpopular, but I strongly feel there are always tiny, seemingly inconsequential clues that one can use to predict certain things.

When I saw the wobbling console, it occured to me that someone within Sony probably noticed that, weighed the pros and cons, looked at the ship dates and budgets and then decided it was "ok".

Now, that was probably the right call. A slightly wobblable console is a complete non-issue. But it does hint at the incredible pressure of ship deadlines and what sort of things they can let slip.
 

Ganondolf

Member
Microsoft said the DOA (not red ring failures necessarily) rate for 360s was 3-5%. So... progress.

me and my two brothers all bought a xbox360 at launch. 2 of our machines a disk drive failures (just after the one year warranty ended). and 1 had rrod.

I was so pissed that I did not get rrod as it would have been replaced.
 

Justin

Member
Jeff tweeted this last night

Jeff Gerstmann ‏@jeffgerstmann 5h
Kind of neat that PS4 has crash reporting. Kind of weak that I've filed two Killzone crash reports this evening.

Probably unrelated but there were also the reports from the review event that Battlefield was crashing every few matches although that sounds like it happens on the PC too.
 
Well the one "good" side is that these problems don't seem to be caused by one major issue. It seems like of these reports they are being caused by different issues. Firmware, HDMI, GPU. So while it's not good that this is happening, I guess it's better than if all the units had faulty GPUs or HDMI ports. So it doesn't seem like there was one major issue that sony knew about and shipped the console anyway.
 
even the xbox360 did not break within a couple of days.
Err... A certain number of 360s would have been defective out of the box.

A certain number of PS3s would have been. A certain number of PS4s will be. A certain number of XB1s will be. A certain number of Wii Us would have been too. And as they continue to be mass produced there will continue to be.

That's without factoring in things like RRODs, that were systematic failures due to choice of materials (iirc) and systems breaking down prematurely for other reasons e.g. blu ray diodes etc.

The issue is whether it's beyond the norm, and nothing here so far seems beyond the norm; again, I think social media is just amplifying awareness.
 
Well the one "good" side is that these problems don't seem to be caused by one major issue. It seems like of these reports they are being caused by different issues. Firmware, HDMI, GPU. So while it's not good that this is happening, I guess it's better than if all the units had faulty GPUs or HDMI ports. So it doesn't seem like there was one major issue that sony knew about and shipped the console anyway.

it would be better if they were all the same issue. Then a mass recall could take place.

lots of different issues means there is no guarantee that all of them ever get fixed.
 
3-5% failure rate for 360?
Microsoft can (and no doubt did) pick and choose what defects are included in that number.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
 

Static Jak

Member
Haven't looked into it yet, but it just seems like a HDMI issue. Like the connection can't plug all the way in. I think it was Kotaku that reported the same thing?

If so, not the end of the world. Annoying as hell but far less worrisome as something like heating issues or RROD and so on. Something like this can be sorted fairly easily.

But yeah, early adoption for high end electronics will always have risks like this. Why I decided to hold back until at least March.
 
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