Failing PS4 Consoles "Within Expectations," Says Sony

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elmo2006

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I get this whole failure rate and all that but IMHO at the end of the day I'm a consumer and I'm shelling out monies to purchase an item. I have purchased many an electronics in my lifetime whereby some have failed on me miserably to say the least, but none of this positive ranting about "being within acceptable tolerances or rates" in IMHO is acceptable.
If you were a store owner and you confronted me with that excuse - there goes the sale!
Lets say for example that you purchased a new car, lets say a Hyundai or Honda and just as you get home, your brakes fail or the transmission starts to slip, will you debate the merits of whether its acceptable or not that this can happen. Will you (not generalizing here of course) purchase the same make and model or refer that particular model or make to a friend?

Maybe I'm venting in the wrong place however this is me and I have high expectations when dolling out money - large sums of money.

I'll be waiting to see what becomes of this.

Cheers!

 

belardo

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If Sony expected .4% failure... they should have had that many on hand for quick replacements.

New tech has issues, all the time.
If a 100 owners of DOA PS4s posted... that doesn't mean 100,000 much less a million are effected.

Maybe its an inside job from MS?
 

belardo

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If Sony expected .4% failure... they should have had that many on hand for quick replacements.

New tech has issues, all the time.
If a 100 owners of DOA PS4s posted... that doesn't mean 100,000 much less a million are effected.

Maybe its an inside job from MS?
 

scottmcg

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Sadly, I was one of the unlucky that got a dud PS4. I have to ship it back to get a replacement. No big deal as I just got my GTX 780 Ti installed in my PC, but still...would have been nice not to have to screw around shipping it back.
 

MKBL

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+1

You are almost a king of gamers. With XB1, you will have all the powerful game machine! Currently I have PS3, XB360, Wii, and PC (i5-2400/256 GB SDD + 500GB HDD/8GB RAM/GTX560 Ti 448), and all of them have been complementary quite well. Next upgrade would be a Maxwell GPU, and I'm not sure if I'm going to get PS4. No XB1 for sure, though.
 

stevejnb

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Might I suggest that buying consumer electronics isn't for you then? I get what you're saying, but failure rate is a universal reality with consumer electronics and, for this particular consumer electronic device, 0.4% is well below the norm in launch week. This isn't "positive ranting," it's a reporter asking Sony a frank question and Sony answering honestly - with a quite favourable number compared to the norm, I might add.

The irony of your complaint is, is 0.4% is the final failure percentile - heck, even three times that - the PS4 launch has actually ended up being a relatively stable one. To go back to your car analogy, this is a car that fails less than the average car at launch. Personally, I keep away from consoles for a full year at least to avoid any such issues, but if you are a first week PS4 adopter, it has been a pretty damned good launch from a hardware failure rate perspective.
 

bochica

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The problem with the Automotive example is, things like that DO happen. I sold cars for 3 years, and every once in a while, you would get a car that had a premature failure of some sort. It happens. Especially with Hyundai's, their Genesis vehicles have been known to have transmission problems within 20,000 miles (even auto reviewers have announced this). However, that is what WARRANTIES are for. You are covered for the length of the guarantee the manufacturer gives you.

The whole point to my view was that there is never a product that has a 0% failure rate, no matter how much money you spend. Whether it is $5 or $5 million, there will be a failure at some point or another. If you were to turn in a failed PS4 at a store, I would tell you it is covered under warranty. Not to mention you are told to contact Sony for any issues, which initiates a RMA process.

Look at Apple with the "Antenna Gate" and the Xbox 360 with the RRoD's, and see how many people returned to those companies. Those failure rates were high compared to the PS4 now, not to mention Apple's response in their issue pissed off a lot of consumers.
 

internetlad

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As with all statistics, some things to weigh.

.4% (1/250) are basically bad out of the box and with the same issue. The console has been out for, what, 3 days? This does not take into account any other potential issues we're going to see in the next few months. Sure, by itself it's not a big number, but that's only one potential issue the console could be facing. I'll wait a month or two to see the feedback on if any other problems are popping up regularly before creating a sensation out of it.

That being said, it could be a lot worse.
 

bochica

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.4% is their projected. Sony did not say that is what the actual value is, only that the fail rate is within the projected. Still it is very very low.
 

buddynugget

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There is no way its only .4%. Every retailer who sold PS4s review pages are flooded with bad reviews some even up to 75%. This isn't just a few people its a hell of a lot of people. Microsoft tried the same crap at the beginning of the RROD fiasco. They downplayed it til it became apparent. I doubt its as high as 30% like the 360 was but it seriously doubtful that its only .4%. Half my friends PS4s are broken. Out of 12 people I know that got one 7 of them have issues. 5 DOAs (PS4 wont turn on at all), 1 Overheating issue, and the other just had some audio/video issues that he fixed by replacing their HDMI cable with his own. I might be wrong but from my own circle of friends this seems to be much much worse.
 

0.4% IS a lot of people. And you cannot go by user reviews. The people whose PS4s work have no particular reason to go rate it.
 

elmo2006

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Points well made, however on the warranty issue, I've got screwed over a few times from both Hyundai and Honda, as everytime something broke it was considered *not under warranty* but again I guess sh!7 happens more often than not. But that's another story for another day which is beyond the scope of this thread.

Cheers!
 

somebodyspecial

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I don't believe these numbers. Are they trying to say ALL of that .4 or .04% are on Amazon? You don't get 1/4 of the reviews as 1 star and DOA if it's not a pretty high percent right? They are not admitting they've been sabotaged or something. Clearly you would deny just like MS on RROD for years. Reporting your launch is sabotaged would severely hurt xmas sales for sure. They will just deny until forced by the web to recognize :) Or simply NEVER admit anything...LOL. If reviews at amazon are true, they can't even get help when calling, most likely due to the LARGE FLOOD of calls coming in for RMA etc. Which if it's only 4000 units I'd think there wouldn't be so many SUPPORT complainers suggesting not being able to handle call volumes.

There are now 3150 reviews and 750 are 1 star DOA stuff at amazon. Assuming the 4000 or so is correct then we are saying amazon themselves got 200-250K units or so for launch? I doubt that. I seriously doubt amazon got 1/4 of Sony's american launch units. No way. So the failure would have to be HIGHER than Sony is claiming right? Not every single person goes online to whine.

Though newegg only has 6 reviews so I guess they didn't try to get many for launch? Then again I could be wrong. Walmart has ZERO reviews (hiding them? Surely walmart got a pretty good sized launch amount right?). Either they are all hiding some negative reviews or maybe amazon really did get the bulk of the launch units (besides maybe direct from Sony-why not cut the middle man out for the bulk of your launch?). I think we'll have more answers in a few weeks as to who sold what and how large the group of DOA units really is (or bricked ones from updates etc). If the bulk of the first units were sold direct via pre-order from SONY we may never know the real numbers though...LOL.
 
You get people giving 1-star reviews for all kinds of silly reasons (as well as legitimate ones). User reviews are utterly unreliable. But it's certainly possible that the problem is more widespread than Sony would have us believe.
 

bochica

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Yes, Sakkura. Always take the reviews with a grain of salt. Especially what I have noticed recently when looking for apartments. People are very quick to post negative reviews, but those who are happy/satisfied with a certain product forget to leave their positive reviews to help balance it out (or give a more accurate spread). I sometimes catch myself doing exactly this. If it wasn't for sites such as Amazon, Newegg, etc. emailing a reminder to throw in a review, I probably wouldn't even leave half of the positive reviews that I have.
 

keviow

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I think the problem is more widespread than Sony are claiming. I am awaiting my third replacement in the space of a month. Each one so far had failed within a week for me. I think Sony may be cutting corners on cheap components. Is my next replacement fails I will be demanding a refund and switching to xbox one.
 

First post huh? I hope Microsoft are paying you well, mr. Astroturfer.
 

keviow

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Actually I hate Microsoft with a passion and have none of their products in my home.
I am just annoyed with having 2 hardware failures in a month.
Hopefully third time lucky!
 
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