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Many PS4 units dead on arrival

amazon.com

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Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#11

Post by hmottestad »

barista wrote: post #8
minimaxir wrote: post #5

I read a comment earlier that made a good point that unlike the console launches of the previous generation in 2004-2006, we now have access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to vocalize and demonstrate our complaints worldwide. It makes the vocal minority much more vocal.

If you clicked on the link above, you will see that nearly 40% of the Amazon reviews are 1*. There is a good chance that most of those people received a dead PS4. Agree that not everybody who received a good PS4 left a positive review but this certainly does not make it looks like a minority.

We know that at least 323 received a broken PS4. At least 492 received a working PS4.

I would guess that 1/10 would write a review when the PS4 is broken and 1/1000 would write a review regardless.

Also we don't know if these are real reviews or just 323 Microsoft employees who were given money to order the PS4 and then post a bad review :P

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#13

Post by floatingatoll »

simias wrote: post #10

The problem with those reviews is those whose console is working are not complaining. Are there any hard numbers on the proportion of dead consoles? Have Sony commented on this issue?

As of right now, there are 323 1-star reviews.

Sony sold "81,639" PS3 consoles on that unit's launch day.

So if Amazon shipped 81,639 PS4 consoles, this would be a failure rate of 4.0 units per 1000, or 0.4%.

Microsoft noted at one point during the Xbox 360 launch that the industry standard failure rate was between 3 and 5%.

Presuming that same 3-5% is the failure rate for the PS4, and that 100% of DOA customers posted a 1-star comment, Amazon sold between 6,460 and 10,766 PS4 units.

I would hope the failure rate is closer to 0.4% than to 4.0%, but I can't even hazard a guess at Amazon's sales volume, so this is where the hard numbers stop.

(ps. I didn't check my math closely and I'm walking out the door, feel free to correct me in replies and I'll edit later to reflect.)

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#14

Post by spaux »

minimaxir wrote: post #7
yelnatz wrote: post #6

At least you know right away that they're dead. It'd be more annoying 6 months down the road.

Or worse, the Xbox 360 RROD issue, which was an inevitable ticking time bomb that could blow at any time.

Idk, I've never had that happen, while some people have had it happen over and over. From my perspective, it doesn't seem any more inevitable than the console becoming obsolete.

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#15

Post by spaux »

floatingatoll wrote: post #13
simias wrote: post #10

The problem with those reviews is those whose console is working are not complaining. Are there any hard numbers on the proportion of dead consoles? Have Sony commented on this issue?

As of right now, there are 323 1-star reviews. Sony sold "81,639" PS3 consoles on that unit's launch day. So if Amazon shipped 81,639 PS 4 consoles, this would be a failure rate of 4.0 units per 1000, or 0.4%. Microsoft noted at one point during the Xbox 360 launch that the industry standard failure rate was between 3 and 5%. Presuming that same 3-5% is the failure rate for the PS4, and that 100% of DOA customers pos…

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.

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#16

Post by ilamont »

minimaxir wrote: post #5

I read a comment earlier that made a good point that unlike the console launches of the previous generation in 2004-2006, we now have access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to vocalize and demonstrate our complaints worldwide. It makes the vocal minority much more vocal.

As I recall, RROD complaints were quite strident after the Xbox 360 came out, on blogs, gaming sites, comment sections of news articles, and the early social sites (Facebook was big among the college crowd at that time, and Friendster, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc. were active discussion areas as well). Most gamers were aware of the issue. Microsoft's return policy and eventual fixes helped change public perception.

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#18

Post by [deleted] »

barista wrote: post #8
minimaxir wrote: post #5

I read a comment earlier that made a good point that unlike the console launches of the previous generation in 2004-2006, we now have access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to vocalize and demonstrate our complaints worldwide. It makes the vocal minority much more vocal.

If you clicked on the link above, you will see that nearly 40% of the Amazon reviews are 1*. There is a good chance that most of those people received a dead PS4. Agree that not everybody who received a good PS4 left a positive review but this certainly does not make it looks like a minority.

[deleted]

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#19

Post by chucknelson »

barista wrote: post #8
minimaxir wrote: post #5

I read a comment earlier that made a good point that unlike the console launches of the previous generation in 2004-2006, we now have access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to vocalize and demonstrate our complaints worldwide. It makes the vocal minority much more vocal.

If you clicked on the link above, you will see that nearly 40% of the Amazon reviews are 1*. There is a good chance that most of those people received a dead PS4. Agree that not everybody who received a good PS4 left a positive review but this certainly does not make it looks like a minority.

Definitely reaching there - you can't assume a large majority of people who ordered from Amazon are leaving reviews. You already know that people without a working console will no doubt go leave a review, so the sample is significantly skewed.

We won't know if this is a real problem until Sony says something.

Disclosure: I ordered my PS4 from Amazon in June, received it yesterday, it works fine...and I have no reason to write a review about it.

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#20

Post by jlgreco »

floatingatoll wrote: post #13
simias wrote: post #10

The problem with those reviews is those whose console is working are not complaining. Are there any hard numbers on the proportion of dead consoles? Have Sony commented on this issue?

As of right now, there are 323 1-star reviews. Sony sold "81,639" PS3 consoles on that unit's launch day. So if Amazon shipped 81,639 PS 4 consoles, this would be a failure rate of 4.0 units per 1000, or 0.4%. Microsoft noted at one point during the Xbox 360 launch that the industry standard failure rate was between 3 and 5%. Presuming that same 3-5% is the failure rate for the PS4, and that 100% of DOA customers pos…

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?

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