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Comment by timw4mail | Hacker News Reader

And there was the same problem with early PS3s, on Nvidia's GPU package...it was a fairly widespread problem at the time.

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And Apple iBook G3s too. There's a whole thing with owners reflowing the GPU: https://www.instructables.com/Fixing-the-infamous-iBook-scre...

I seem to recall baking PC nvidia GPU boards in your oven was a reasonably common out-of-warranty fix around that era.

I had to do this with my MacBook Pro models early 2015 and late 2017.

It seems like there was a period in time when solder just wasn’t done well, it seems like.

IIRC this is to do with the phase in of RoHS and bad lead free solder

I don't have any solid numbers on me, but I believe early 360s failing wasn't just widespread; it was straight up most of them dying within the first couple years. It's honestly insane they more or less got away with that. And I guess also speaks to how much Microsoft was killing it in that era that people were willing to go through multiple console RMAs (which I heard was a terrible, slow, and unreliable process) to play 360 games. How far they've fallen.

Family got first gen 360. Still works to this day. We hit the jackpot with that console. It out lasted 2 wiis and a ps2

Whenever we lost a 360 we got a pre owned 360 from gamestop. I think they went for like $70 for one without any hdd.

That was the real story, by the time they started dying you could just grab a working one for "decently cheap" if you still cared.

However, I wonder how many people got "burned" by it and swore off Xbox consoles going forward.

I know that era we got a lot more use out of the Xbox (original) and the Wii.

I knew plenty of people who had rrod no one swore off xbox though. You were still in the ecosystem through games, controllers, xbox live membership, and in my case network effects since we all played halo.

Simple answer: Halo 3.

It was something like 25% - 50% of all first version 360s died.

Microsoft spent over a billion dollars replacing and repairing consoles to maintain the good brand name of Xbox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

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