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Many PS4 units dead on arrival

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Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#111

Post by snogglethorpe »

city41 wrote: post #58
jlgreco wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use to own a PS1 and a PS2 (The PS2 being the last console I have owned). I never heard about these problems until now. You'd be hard pressed to find a 360 owner that doesn't know of the RROD. You'd be hard pressed to find a non-gamer below their 30s who hasn't heard at least once something about the RROD. Don't mistake this for praise of Sony. Obviously they have a serious problem with the PS4, and I despise the c…

That's not my point. Of course the RROD was a monumental issue. Probably the biggest video game hardware related issue ever. My point is Sony's hardware is quite famous for being extremely unreliable. Every Playstation generation has been plagued with issues. Widespread, class action lawsuit worthy, issues. Sony has never once addressed them, admitted them, or made any effort to improve their quality. Sony simply doe…

> My point is Sony's hardware is quite famous for being extremely unreliable

s/hardware/game systems/

Sony had a reputation for quality (and style) prior to (and aside from) the Playstation.

According to a friend of mine that worked for them back-in-the-day, the SCE division was a sort of black sheep within Sony, insular and culturally rather distinct, and even rather hated by mainstream Sony management (especially at SCE's "height" when they became crazy arrogant). However, the Playstation was so insanely popular that Sony had little choice but to tolerate it.

I don't know what things are like now, but I'd think that time, the importance of the PS to Sony, and things like the PS3 fiasco ("they can just get a second job to pay for it!") may have moderated SCE and brought it into the fold somewhat.

[Sony's other divisions weren't perfect, of course, and especially really low-end stuff (e.g. $25 phones) not made in Japan didn't really transcend their price-point. But they've always had a pretty good reputation in general.]

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#112

Post by Amadou »

barrkel wrote: post #107
nsomaru wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you search Google with a quoted string, you will receive only results with a string of those words, in the order specified. However, if you do not quote the string, Google still searches for all non-common words, but they can be distributed variously around the document. Thus, the white space between search terms can be considered to be an 'and' construct.

the white space between search terms can be considered to be an 'and' construct No it can't. Google used to support + prefix on search terms to ensure they appeared on the pages in the results, but that was removed because of Google Plus. Now, to ensure that your query returns results that contain all the words searched for, you need to quote them individually. https://www.google.com/search?q="PS4"+"blue"+"light"+"of…

There is also the "allintext:" modifier. Any words after that are searched for verbatim, not even stemming (which is applied to words in quotes).

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#114

Post by jlgreco »

ajasmin wrote: post #31
jlgreco wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 caus…

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?"

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#115

Post by tetha »

spaux wrote: post #15
floatingatoll wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#116

Post by easytiger »

Lagged2Death wrote: post #75
whalesalad wrote: post #62

Apparently it's an overheating issue[0]. The 'red line of death' is not a sign that your PS4 is dead, but a sign that it needs to shut down to cool off. If that is happening immediately on boot, then hopefully the temp sensor or overall temp system is flawed and can be fixed either by a Sony patch or really quickly in their manufacturing process. Hard to believe something like that slipped through the cracks. Reminds…

Apparently it's an overheating issue[0]. The 'red line of death' is not a sign that your PS4 is dead, but a sign that it needs to shut down to cool off. The Amazon reviews are complaining of a blinking blue "light of death," which I don't see described in the manual you linked to. "PS4 blue light of death" returns over 2 million Google results already. I'm no EE but I wonder if there is something really strange at pl…

Only two of those reviews are Verified Purchases. That looks fishy to me.

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#117

Post by philliphaydon »

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…

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

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#118

Post by makomk »

chucknelson wrote: post #19
barista wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, it looks - at a glance - like more of the 5* reviews are from verified purchasers than the 1* reviews. Presumably a bunch of people who didn't buy from Amazon and had a DOA PS4 went onto Amazon and posted an angry review, but people who got a working one had no reason to.

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#119

Post by Tloewald »

sgift wrote: post #87
threeseed wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"PS4 blue light of death" returns 101 results. If you mean searching without the quotes then that is just stupid since Google will return results that match only one of the search terms.

PS4 "Blue light of death" ~ 18k results.

You want PS4+ "blue light of death"+

Which got me 4 hits, with duplicates.

Re: Many PS4 units dead on arrival

#120

Post by VLM »

easytiger wrote: post #116
Lagged2Death wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it's an overheating issue[0]. The 'red line of death' is not a sign that your PS4 is dead, but a sign that it needs to shut down to cool off. The Amazon reviews are complaining of a blinking blue "light of death," which I don't see described in the manual you linked to. "PS4 blue light of death" returns over 2 million Google results already. I'm no EE but I wonder if there is something really strange at pl…

Only two of those reviews are Verified Purchases. That looks fishy to me.

I found a few more verified but not many. The really fishy part is I clicked thru to see all of a reviewer's reviews, and of course 9 of 10 of the non verified purchases have this as their only review ever entered in the system... its mostly an astroturf campaign, and not a very well run one.

The only non-astroturf non-verified review I could find was a guy who was VERY complimentary toward a bluetooth headphone from three years ago. Every other non-verified review smells astroturf-y.

I was thinking how to run an astroturf campaign like this on amazon reviews and I figured it was too expensive, you need herds of expensive prepaid CC to order a competitors product, then you need a botnet like herd of fake accounts to create a review history, then the botnet like herd needs to order and trash talk the competitors product, it all gets very expensive. However, it turns out all you need is a throwaway email address and solve a captcha and you've got a decent PR campaign, till someone notices.

I'm not implying all the buzz is astroturfing, merely around 90% of it. There are, I'm sure, DOA machines out there, just not many.

I have no dog in the fight in that I'm not planning to buy either, at least not planning to right now.

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