Re: 'Industry standard' error rate.

I admittedly haven't worked in manufacturing at anything even resembling that scale, but I did spend a summer working for a company that assembled, sold, and installed PCs to local small businesses and (particularly) school districts. A 4-5% failure rate, at the point of installation, would have been absolutely inconceivable in that job.

Sure, there were lots of failures, most caused by assembly errors, some caused by damage during assembly, some due to component failures, but the vast majority were caught before the trucks were loaded. One guy with a rolling swivel chair and several industrial-sized KVM switches can verify that 500 (what you might expect for several computer labs across a single school district, for school districts the size we were dealing with) or so PCs will more or less work in really just a few minutes. I would assert that this sort of manual sanity checking is the sort of operation that is embarrassingly parallelizable too. Two people can check a batch of 1000 just as fast as one person can check 500. 20 people should be able to do 10,000.

And this was a small operation. Were we larger, it may have made sense to look into more automation.

Between those checks, and when they were hauled into schools and plugged in? Nothing much about a tractor trailer ride is going to make a PC go DOA.

So I guess my question is, what sort of QA are they doing at the factory to get a 4-5% DOA rate? Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?

Not that this happened with my fiancé's PS4, but OnTrac (a CA/NV? local carrier that Amazon often uses) has employees with an infuriating habit of throwing packages over gates.

And I don't mean soft padded envelopes that really won't suffer from being thrown over the gate, but boxes including (from the last six months) computer equipment, a sunrise alarm clock, glass canning jars, bottles containing liquids, and more. hurled about 8 feet (to clear the gate) and down onto the stone behind it. The place I lived at before, they threw a box hard enough to leave a mark on the door. Then I have to waste my time complaining to OnTrac and Amazon about the broken glass and non-functioning equipment and return and replace it hoping the next delivery guy doesn't screw it up. Some days I feel like Amazon uses too much padding for something so trivial, and then I realize I have to deal with OnTrac and then there cannot be enough padding for my packages.

I will not be surprised at all if the DOA rate takes into account factors like that.

OnTrac likes to just leave packages in front of my door. On Market Street in San Francisco and mark the packages signed by "Door." Once in a while they'll ring the doorbell, but often I'll just find it there. So far, no one has stolen anything, but boy does it make me nervous.

Oh man. I live on Market too. OnTrac has done that same exact thing before, and sometimes I only discover it because someone passing on the street or a neighbor rings my doorbell to let me know I have a box outside. They also don't seem to be able to read, as they will accidentally deliver packages to xx30 when we're xx20 and vice versa.

I hate them so much. I go out of my way to leave terrible feedback for shipping on every OnTrac package I get at this point. Their reps keep telling me they're not going to do it any more and still it's such terrible service that I would cancel Prime membership if it wasn't for most packages being delivered by UPS/FedEx/USPS.

Here on the East coast we have LaserShip, which sounds like pretty much the same deal. They once delivered my package to a city 30 miles away to a family with a completely different name. Amazon loves to use them here too. It's a bit distressing that they don't exercise better oversight over their shippers, given how central that is to their business model.

I have had lasership make mistakes couple of times (dropping of at the neighbors, claiming no answer when never attempted).. I complained to amazon about the shipping and I have not received any shipment from them via Lasership after that. I am a prime member though. (not sure if that changes)..

LaserShip's been pretty good to me. They're the only delivery service that actually calls my cell to let me know the package is here (I WFH and can sign for it, and the intercom's been busted since I moved in).

Famous Xbox 360 problem (RROD) was not on arrival. So probably they mentioned this 4-5% statistics for some period of time, not for DOA.

Ah, that would make a bit more sense.

I don't know much about manufacturing either. But, wouldn't Sony also make sure their units "more or less work" before they leave the factory?

I mean, the thing could be working on departure and dead on arrival.

That possibility is where this section applies:

"Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?"

Also, no way that 100% of bad orders came in and have a review. The old rubric was that for every vocal complaining customer (forums, reviews, etc) there are 7-10 in the wings not complaining. So I would say that you can't really draw conclusions simply based on the reviews, unless you want to inflate them by an order of magnitude.

I'm more upset by the way they are handling it, it looks like they aren't going to replace them, but try to fix them. Anyone who's sent an RROD xbox (I haven't) knows the pain that will come with that. You'll see your PS4 again in a few weeks.

I had the RROD with an XBox and they were _very_ quick getting it back. I think it was a couple of days. It's still an inconvenience, but it was also after more than a year of use.

Ctl-Alt-Del is referring to this as the "Pulsing Blue Dick-Punch of Death". I think everyone should do everything they can to spread that term. It's too good to pass up.

Unless you lived right by, and I mean next door, to the refurb place I believe in Texas, it was never a few days. A few weeks maybe. I've had a Xbox 360 since launch go through 2 rrod's (so not really the same console) and at best it was 2 weeks to Georgia. They handled everything but shipping was never 2/3 day or better either way. I haven't had a return in 2-3 years now so maybe they got soooo good at the end that changed but I never remember it being that quick. MS also finally owned up to and corrected a serious design flaw. I don't expect the same from Sony just yet. You'll at least get them looking at it in the same manner initially. It behooves everyone for them to check it out and refurbish first, then just replace as they determine the root cause.

I must not play my 360 enough but I have one of the originalish white 360's bought at the same time as others (not day one, but before any of the fixes) and never had a RROD.

But now that I say that online watch it die the next time I turn it on. Glad I never had to send it in because Minnesota is a skosh farther than Georgia.

I live in Poland and had a white one RROD after about 11 months. Everybody told me: it'll take weeks. So I sent it in and went out and got myself one of the slim ones. Five or six days after a courier came to pick it up, another one came to drop it off. It'd go to Germany, been fixed and sent back to the Poland in under a week.

I forgot about that point. At some stage they would send you a refurb as you likely "proved" you sent yours in. They knew they would replace it so sometimes it would come back stupid quick. In all but the last of mine, I got the same unit back which likely accounts for the delays. They, and I as well, likely preferred letting us keep the same unit for warranty, live, etc purposes as the "move my stuff to a new Xbox" wasn't terribly fun to do, much less any more than once.

It is imperative to get the playstations working, simply from a buisness view. Game publishers want to position their releases into the hype around the newly released PS4. If an unknown, not really small number of PS4s just doesn't work, two bad things happen: i) these people won't buy those games due to a lack of console and even worse, ii) will probably start talking to their friends - and guess what happens, if someone is on the fence about the new console and his friend is like "Yeah I got my PS4 and it doesn't work". It's not a pretty situation, especially if one starts thinking about reported cases vs real numer of cases.

You're also assuming everyone with a dead unit bothered to post a review

I'd say that the distribution is likely that most of the people with a dead unit posted reviews, while most of the people who received a working unit have not (and are likely still playing it).

People are far more likely to complain than to praise, and a dead unit arriving for a fairly expensive hot commodity is definitely cause for complaint, especially for something people are so passionate about as a PS4.

I'd be eager to see how many of those low ratings were due to people who took the day off to play it and couldn't.

I'm quite surprised you came to that number given this announcement by sony.

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PS4-Failure-Rate-0-4-Says-S...

"Presuming ... that 100% of DOA customers posted a 1-star comment"

Compare the stats on Dec 24th to Dec 26th, I bet they'll be an interesting change.

Christmas is only like 5 weeks away; its not like they released in June or something. A very large fraction of PS4 shipped probably are covered in gift wrapping paper right now.

Bonus points if they had the sense to ship a one month warranty five weeks before christmas... it might be bad, but it can't be that bad, or can it?

If it were just the industry standard failure rate then we should have seen a similar pattern of bad reviews for the other recent console launches. I don't know if that happened or not, but I think you're making it a bit too easy just blaming it on the standard failure rate.

Looking at Amazon and the internet, it looks like its FAR more than xbox360 fail rate.