Less than 3% of XBox 360s are Defective
Microsoft says the number of defective XBox 360’s is less than 3% of all units, and that this is below the industry average (via Joystiq).
Presumably these things are tested before they leave the factory; I wonder what happens on the trip between the factory and the living room that causes about 1 in 30 to break.
December 3rd, 2005 at 12:18 am
Well, maybe their test suite doesn’t have 100% coverage of all functionality. There’s no way to test 100% af all functionality on 100% of boxes built in a timely manner. Or maybe they test the chips individually, and then not completely after assembly, so they lose some during assembly. Or maybe most of the boxes are crapping out because the power supply blows, and it takes longer than the length of their testing to show up. I believe all of the above, myself. They are building in the neighborhood of 30 – 50K per day of these things if they want to reach their 3 million in the first 90 days target. If their post assembly testing ran for 10 minutes, then they would have to be testing around 300 of them in parallel 24 hours a day to test 100% of the units. They *do* test 100% of the units, so my bet is on lower parallelization and shorter test time.