And yet neither me nor the half-dozen or so friends I have with 360s have ever had the RRoD, and statistically the majority of owners will never have any hardware problems within the normal lifespan of the console.
Ahh, yes. 'My friends haven't had any problems, so therefore they don't exist.'
Statistically...we don't know what the statistics are, though independent research has put the figure at around 30%. Which is, umm, a bit too high.
I can guarantee that a lot of problems people have with their 360s is due to the way they treat them. I'm well aware that the RRoD is a manufacturer's issue and I'm not excusing that, and the 360 might very well be a very finnicky machine, but I've seen the way too many people treat their electronics to ignore the possibility that someone is just a dumbass who left his 360 on the carpet with a pizza box on top if it for three straight days before it bonked.
What a load of crap. I'm obsessive about the condition of my electronics, nearly to the point of OCD. My Xbox 360 sits on a stable surface, half-metre above the ground, with plenty of breathing room around the console and the power brick. It's never bumped and I never, ever, change its orientation.
And yet it still chews my discs to buggery and dies for no apparent reason.
I agree that some people agitate the machine by treating it poorly, but make no mistake: Microsoft dropped the ball here. The Xbox 360's failure rate - by comparison to any other console in history - is astronomical. People don't treat their 360s any different than they treated their PS3s, Dreamcasts, PS1s, PS2s, SNES', Mega Drives, or whatever. Yet still they die by the truckload. There's nobody to blame here but Microsoft, and
they said so themselves.
