Spectrum Dead On Arrival Stats
Dr. Rupe, who worked at Sinclair Research at the time, sees parallels with Microsoft and the XBox saga
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10007101o-2000331777b,00.htm
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10007101o-2000331777b,00.htm
Post edited by Geoff on
Comments
Or do people just expect anything with Microsoft on it to be unreliable, and set their expectations accordingly?
It seems that Microsoft is worse, though. From the sounds of it - how many XBox 360s will work 25 years after manufacture? I wager the good 'ol Speccy is more likely to survive in working order for a long time better than the 360 if the referenced blog post's source is authentic.
For me, this it. I have an XBox 360 and I fully expect it to stop working within a year or two. It occasionally behaves very oddly and has done since I bought it. I have seen the red warning rings a couple of times but luckily it booted up again after being left alone and switched off for a while.
I only got my XBox 360 because my friend back in the UK has one and we planned to play online together a lot, but in fact have only done this half a dozen times in 18 months because it is a bit of a hassell to arrange a time when we shall both be on our XBoxes. My friend?s XBox 360 broken a few months back and he bought another one.
When mine breaks I will not bother replacing it and will consider getting a PS3. If they ever release a new version of the XBox 360 that is smaller, quieter, more reliable and has a bigger hard drive then I may give the 360 another go.
The thing is the speccy's that are around and working now, are the strong ones in the upper reaches of the failure distribution curve and the dud have been whittled out by a process of natural selection.
My first, xmas 1983 lasted 1 day before the Power pack started making a very load buzzing.
My Second (27th Dec 1983) Lasted just under a year, and had to go back just before xmas 1983.
My Third lasted until 1989 when I decided to take out an interface when the power was in.
I now have 5 speccy's 3 which work and 2 that don't - That includes my third one.
My first Spectrum was in 1984, when the Issue 4S board was being made - by when they had sorted out the problems. By contrast, the Xbox 360 apparently still has serious problems with its current incarnation. It's almost like Microsoft has applied their software process to hardware. But software design flaws can be fixed easily after the fact with automatic updates. Bad thermal design can't be fixed after the fact over the internet.
The other home computer manufacturers were also pretty terrible in the 80s, too. Commodore owners seemed to go through power supplies like hot dinners (and Commodore power supplies seemed to never be designed right - I had a Commodore 80386 PC that went through three in less than a year).
And don't get me started on having to prop the old Playstations diagonally to get them to play a game.
The reason I was thinking about it was because I was playing on my Super Famicom (SNES) which is an original Japanese release and almost 20 years old and still going strong but no doubt some of you chaps still have your Speccies which are getting on for 30 :)
The root cause of the failures isn't the moving parts though, it's thermal dissipation problems and having a design that relies on too fine tolerances. The thermal problems will doom the machine long before the typical end of life of a hard disc (which, if they don't fail within the first month seem to generally soldier on for years).
The DVDs fail all the time as well....I know about the thermal problems but my point was its a bad comparison (xbox and speccy) as anything with moving parts will not last as long as something that doesn't..(generally!) regardless of the board/thermal issues.
This is what's worrying about the 360.
I don't care if a computer or console has problems at launch, to some extent those could happen to any manufacturer and are inevitable when you're selling a complex product that's used by millions of people. I deliberately never buy a product at launch for those reasons.
The Xbox 360 isn't new though, it's been out for two and a half years, potentially half way through its lifetime of software support. If they were going to fix the appalling failure rate it should have happened by now.
Thats a good point, I thought they had the thermal issues fixed now though?
My +2's got moving parts! Granted, they don't move very quickly, but still...
My Z88 has moving parts too, but that's just because the rubber keyboard's a bit torn.
Which, apparently, is caused by thermal issues (the drive apparently is just getting cooked). Optical drives that don't get cooked should soldier on for years, I have CD players that still work that are about 20 years old (actually, my Dad has that old CD player of mine), and my Dad's video recorder (nasty mechanical devices at the best of time) still runs, and it's about 20 years old too. My digital-8 tape video recorder gets strapped to the side of a brutally shaking sidecar racing outfit (which has to really be wearing on bearings) and has outlived many xboxes. Most of my computers are old, even my main PC is 5 years old and the DVD drive in it is 8 years old (and still runs fine). The floppy disc drive on my BBC Micro still functions perfectly (as do all but 2 of the floppies!). Both 15 year old hard discs in my VAX still run fine. I have a lot of old rotating storage, and it still all rotates. While moving parts will ultimately have a higher failure rate than non-moving, a good proportion of hard disc drives and optical disc drives should last a long time and shouldn't have the fatality rate of xbox 360 parts. Unless it's an IBM DeathStar drive (now Hitachi - and they've fixed that problem!)
The failure rate of the xbox 360 DVD drives seems way out of line with the expected failure rate of DVD drives...and it's probably because they are getting cooked.
Does anyone else think that last paragraph is complete bullshit? From what I remember it wasn't p*ssed-off (ex)customers that 'killed' Sinclair.
Yeah, I was under the impression it was blowing all the cash on the C5 wot dun it. Even Microsoft wouldn't have recovered from that.
I'm going to go and touch every piece of wood in the house after I type this...
From personal experience with my new 360 (got it for Christmas) I can say that it runs very cool indeed - comparable with the temperature that the outside of the Wii reaches when playing, even after a couple of hours playing Bioshock.
Mind you, it sounds like a musk ox stuck in a wind tunnel.
Dunno whether its the new Falcon chipset inside though, but I think they've improved the thermal issues with the Zephyr chipset anyway.
*Goes off to touch wood* (Fnar!)
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Well, that and the QL. Once they had the Spectrum sorted out it was a decent machine.