Pachterdamus: More PS price drops predicted

[jwalton]

Re: Pachterdamus: More PS price drops predicted

Yeah, repaired multiple times. Problem being that the issues with those refurbished systems wasn't being addressed. Repeatedly getting refurbished systems that keep breaking down tends to make people more vocal. The same broken 360s are traded around in a vicious cycle.

Failure rate of 30% means 1/3 of the 360s have broken. You seriously think 3.3 million Xbox 360s are broken? Statistically, that means 1/3 of mine, and everyone else's friends list should be comprised of people who had a broken 360. Look at the numbers for crying out loud, and not just the number in front of the percents. 3-5% of 10 million+ consoles is NOT SMALL. 3 to 5% is 300,000 to 500,000+ broken Xbox 360s. That IS a serious problem. Claiming 3.3 million broken Xbox 360s is so outrageous as to be complete bullshit.

But since I'm willing to bite, pray tell, what researchers are you referring to here, and what retailers were polled? HOW were they polled? I want references.

Question everything. Never take anything at face value. News sites thrive on sensationalist reporting.

[Aeni]

Re: Pachterdamus: More PS price drops predicted

It's called clustered statistics and it's a phenomenon that happens quite often, believe it or not.

Imagine, if you will, that on a particular day, if a batch of parts were bad (received from a 3rd party source) and that a manufacturing plant was installing this into an equal batch of XBOX units ... which are then shipped into the same region (Heck, maybe to just one store) where all the consumers in that particular city bought the units at...

Then, you have a local news paper, say, the Town Crier, and have them poll everyone in that city about XBOX issues. Of course, your failure rate, *gasps* magically hit 50%.

This is called clustering.

I would believe a more universal standard in polling, which would involve polling 100 cities in the U.S., then making sure the sampling was from a wide demographic (from poor to rich folks, etc.) maybe at minimum, 100 households sampled.

10,000 households polled should provide for a more accurate picture than say, polling one EB store in Boston MA and trying to gather a meaningful number from just 50 units sold in a week period...

[jwalton]

Re: Pachterdamus: More PS price drops predicted

The funny thing about this whole debacle is that according to Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the research firm Directions on Microsoft based in Kirkland, Washington, the 1.15 billion dollars is enough money to cover approximately 2.5 million console repairs. Assuming absolute worst case scenario in that Microsoft never sells another console over the remainder of its console lifespan and that each of these damaged consoles only gets repaired once, and only once... that would put the failure rate at 25% at an absolute maximum. Seeing how Microsoft is continuing to sell consoles with an ultimate goal to break the 100 million console mark, and that their billion dollar down payment is projecting through the console lifespan, it's pretty obvious that the failure rate of the 360 is greatly exaggerated. A major problem to be sure, but the statistics people have thrown out has all been anecdotal evidence.

[Manatra]

Re: Pachterdamus: More PS price drops predicted

It should also be noted that part of the cost is Microsoft fixing the consoles they currently have as well.