Many PS4 units dead on arrival | Hacker News Reader

Many PS4 units dead on arrival

amazon.com

197 pointsmanojlds131 comments

I find it interesting that as of now with 516 5 star reviews and 332 1 star reviews (and very few 2, 3 or 4 star reviews) the average still shows up as 3.5 stars. It's interesting since the lowest value possible is 1, so more realistically it's not 3.5/5 but 2.5/4. I'm wondering if this makes a psychological difference and if less people would buy something on amazon if they changed their rating system to go from 0 - 4 stars.

This has always bothered me, both on Amazon and the iTunes app store. No lie, when I published my first app, one of the comments was "I'd rate this zero stars if I could." and my first thought was actually "wait, why can't you?"

Overall, I think YouTube was on the ball by switching to a "Thumbs up, Thumbs down" rating system. "Out of five star" rating systems are always sabotaged by the fact that most people think in absolutes: Either something is the bee's knees or it's fried shit on a biscuit. Given that most people vote this way, up/down vote systems are better at giving an honest impression of how people feel about something.

I wonder if a five star rating system could secretly count only the 2 and 4 star reviews without telling anyone, sort of filter out anyone passionate enough to try to game things...

That might work, but I have doubts. Interestingly, it's the opposite approach the the one taken by pre-employment personality tests, in which each question has no partial credit and exactly one right answer, which is either "strongly agree" or "strongly disagree".

Oh right!

I think Barbara Ehrenreich mentioned that in Nickel and Dimed. At Walmart, one of the hiring surveys included some question pitting personal considerations or ethics against loyalty to management, and the only correct answer was absolute loyalty to management. When she debated the point, she was not offered a job.

In college, I got a part-time job for a stretch of some months grading exercises at the local Kumon center. The job consisted primarily of comparing a filled-out exercise booklet to a printed list of answers and marking incorrect answers. (The other part, the good part, was talking to the kids and trying to help them with problems they didn't get.)

My boss was never happy with the speed at which I worked. Eventually she told me I was too smart for the job and should aim higher. In a vaguely similar way, I don't think Wal-mart is looking for their lowest-level employees to make a lot of independent ethical decisions on the job. If you're going to be hiring unskilled labor, you might not want them to exercise a lot of discretion, on the theory that they're at least as likely as not to screw it up.

I think the human mind is best at that. Even if there are too many reviews for you to completely read, you can sample them, especially the ones others have rated for usefulness, and with some practice recognize the ones that are passionate with sufficient support.

Specificity is one think I really look for. Those who say essentially nothing more than "It's wonderful" or "It sucks" are noise. Those that say, "It's great, but I'm subtracting one star because the control console is a pain because of X, W and Y" are golden ... especially when people add comments on workarounds....

It's kind of funny, in that this "impersonal" mail order outfit very often manages to provide a better shopping experience than brick and mortar stores for those of us willing to buy things sight unseen. Heck, it's not uncommon for me to check Amazon.com reviews before buying something from one of those.

IMDB (which is a 10-star system) has a 'secret algorithm' that fiddles with the raw data to come up with a computed score. It's been suggested that some of the factors involved include reduced weight for 1 and 10 star ratings (as well as the age of the user's account - votes from new accounts don't get as much weight, etc).

I'd guess that moderation (as measured by 2-4 as opposed to 1 or 5 stars) is a worse predictor of an opinion's relevance than even the most simplistic automated classification of textual or behavioral feedback.

While you both have a point, I'm not sure it makes a difference in practice.

OK, granted, I've been an Amazon.com customer since 1997 or so, but to me a 3.5 star rating is like writing BEWARE! in flaming letters across the sky. I never buy something that poorly rated before thoroughly investigating what's behind it. E.g. Kindle version's content is messed up I discount since I don't play in that ecosystem except for freebies.

While there are plenty of mostly bi-modal distributions (5 or 1 stars), for lots of things there are carefully chosen ratings in-between, often telling you why it lost a star or 2. Even ones edited some time after with additional commentary and often an adjusted score.

So I'd say it gets the specific job done, which is quite different than YouTube's where the cost of a wrong choice is very very small. I find the reviews invaluable, to the point where there's a lot of stuff I won't buy unless it has enough quality reviews for me to make an informed judgement.

http://xkcd.com/1098/

I find the 5 star system on Amazon useful. I don't always look at the average rating, but rather the distribution graph of ratings.

For example, one common shape looks like this:

   5 stars: |||||||||||
   4 stars: ||||||||
   3 stars: ||||
   2 stars: ||
   1 star:  |||||||

There's way more 1 star than 2 or 3. That usually indicates the product shows up DOA for a lot of people, or is otherwise probabilistically totally unsuitable for some group of people.

If the number of star ratings follows a more normal curve like the following, then I'm more confident in the quality of the product, even if both have an average 4 star rating:

   5 stars: |||||||
   4 stars: ||||||||
   3 stars: ||||
   2 stars: ||
   1 star:  |

This would make a fascinating study of reliability - can you determine statistically if a product will be reliable based on rating distribution.

You could study Amazon, App Store ratings, etc. Cool insight!

It's been done, and I've seen it as a worked example in introduction to Bayesian stats pages, maybe some of which were posted on HN.

I wouldn't take any rating metric seriously unless it accounted for how long they've owned it. Plus there's the difference between "I've owned 12 lawnmowers and this one's pretty okay, only broke down after 1.5yrs, 3 stars" and "this is my first lawnmower, used it once, it's amazing, never going back to cutting my lawn with scissors, 5 stars". Plus niche sites sometimes have better reviews for the same products (newegg).

All that said, there is information to be harvested in some of these reviews.

Good point about niche sites and the length of ownership. I've noticed that a number of starts on products like top rated power supplies goes down after a year an a half or so. While you might be getting a newly released power supply with 500 reviews averaging closer to 5 stars, after 2 years, you will notice that same product with 1600 reviews averaging at below 4 stars, because owners probably came back and updated their reviews.

It would be interesting to see a trend line of change in sentiment about a products over time, using existing data.

The other common pattern being shill reviews:

   5 stars: ||||||||||||
   4 stars: ||
   3 stars: ||||
   2 stars: |||||
   1 star:  ||||||||

A lot of times, the 1-star ratings are only "knee-jerk reactions". The 5-star ratings are sometimes added by people related to the product (or people who for some reason have an agenda). I usually drop those two and focus on the 2-4 reviews.

Who rates something 3? Why bother to interact with a UI to express utter meh?

> most people think in absolutes: Either something is the bee's knees or it's fried shit on a biscuit. (Yes, this is from two levels up.)

There was a fascinating post to the OKCupid blog discussing the distribution of attractiveness ratings (also on a 1-5 scale).

Ratings of women by men looked like this:

    5: ||||
    4: ||||||||
    3: ||||||||||
    2: ||||||||
    1: ||||

Ratings of men by women looked like this:

    5: ||
    4: ||
    3: |||
    2: |||||||
    1: ||||||||||||||||||||

EDIT: As you might expect when working from memory, I got some details wrong. Post is here: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...

Obvious corrections:

Scale is 0-5, not 1-5

Curve for women is not as steep as depicted in my comment. However, the modal rating is 1, followed by 0. In the words of the post, "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh."

Netflix does a great job by showing hint text of "Hated it" for 1 star. It certainly helps calibrate people, rather than having individuals come up with their own meaning of what 1-5 means.

up/down systens are stupid since they are so binary. It only remotely works to give you an actual picture of what people think about it. Having a five scale score is very logical, since it's symetric (and therefore not biased like the 6 scores rating you suggest if you could rate without stars), and you give a degree of satisfaction and not just up or down. It's way superior to tell you if the product is exceptional or just "meh".

Of course you have to look at the ratings distribution and not just the average. The average tells you almost nothing.

It's possible that Amazon Verified Purchases are weighted higher than just a random person reviewing a product.

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 me of Dave Baggett's recent story[1] about how when you jiggled a controller stick during save, cross-talk on the motherboard would end up causing your memory card to become completely erased. I'm no EE but I wonder if there is something really strange at play here ... like perhaps old wiring in your home. I only say this because I can't imagine a really straightforward reason for this to be happening, unless they have a bad batch of temp sensors?

Fortunately iFixit has taken apart the PS4 already, so we can take a look inside the chassis[2]. There's a lot of talk there on the 'revolutionary' cooling system. There's a giant fan/heatsink combination for the CPU, and the exhaust air seems to flow over the PSU to cool it passively. There's another fan beneath the motherboard which looks pretty small.

Could also be a case of left-over tape or manufacturing material, like we saw with some of the Macbooks coming off the assembly line. There was a piece of plastic/tape coviering the exhaust vent that caused the fans to quickly go full speed and the system to get real hot. I can't find a reference to it anywhere though.

In other news, I'm anxiously awaiting my Xbox One pre-order and hope that it doesn't have any of the same issues :)

0. http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/basic/partnam...

1. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/M...

2. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+4+Teardown/19493

I laughed at this due to the bad home wiring thing. I agree this may be possible, however its what my ISP would always say regarding crap speeds. In a fit of rage I paid someone to cat 6 the house - everything we own is brand new. The way we are running it, it is one wire from the side of the house to the router, no joins, shortest possible run, away from all power cables and makes crossings at appropriate angles. No change to connection speed. Credit to them I suppose as they backed down fast after the next use of the "home wiring" line was met with me asking if they wanted the paperwork on the specs of the new wiring that had made zero discernible difference.

Why would you do all that and not just connect something directly to the router? Could have saved quite a bit of money and hassle.

Umm? I think I'm missing something? The wiring goes lamp post to house, box on side of house, cable comes out, goes to router (sometimes with several bit and prices coming off for other jack points). I replaced all the wiring between the box on the side of the house and the router. Connecting directly to the router is what I was doing the whole time.

"In a fit of rage I paid someone to cat 6 the house."

Made is sound like you paid to cat6 the house in the hopes it would fix your speed issues. Did you mean RG6 from pole to house? Cat6 is the Ethernet cabling. Even then, if the issue was due to poor cabling from pole to house, that should be apparent in signal levels on the cable modem diagnostics page.

Yeah, it was apparent that massive line noise was the issue. I'm not sure about other countries, but cat6 is standard spec cabling for house data wiring (for phone, and data) here in NZ - the line (fibre or copper) switches to cat6 at the point where the line company ownership ceases and the homeowners bit begins. The line company always blame the last few metres of cable, which, not coincidentally , isn't owned by them. I was not aware that the router could help me diagnose the exact source of the noise - surely it just knows total noise between exchange and router?

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 play here ... like perhaps old wiring in your home.

I really don't think so.

"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 "blinking blue light of death": https://google.com/search?q=ps4+%22blinking+blue+light+of+de...

I doubt Google is that dumb.

The estimate without quotes for "PS4 blue light of death" is 34M. For "Xbox One blue light of death" is 2.7M.

Although requesting the highest page (990) shows ~288 pages, so estimates are probably not that accurate.

Of course Google is not that dumb. If you don't put quotes in then it will return results that have any of the terms. They do this because they are an advertising company and so it is better to have lots of SRPs returned than none.

What you are doing by not using quotes is dumb.

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"+"d... returns about 1.5 million results. A scan of the 10th page shows that many of them talk about other lights of death, and happen to also mention PS4 and "blue".

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

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

Seriously ? Do people not understand how Google works ?

Search for PS4 "Blue light of death". Click on Page 10. You will see results about Wii U / Epic 4G blue lights of death. Google stopped requiring pages to have all search terms a long time ago now.

Seriously, not everybody will have the same results from google for the same search, don't you know about the filter bubble [1]?

Then again the number of google result never was a very good indicator even less since google search started removing search features and return only a single page of supposedly relevant results.

[1]:http://dontbubble.us/

You want PS4+ "blue light of death"+

Which got me 4 hits, with duplicates.

"ps4" "blue light of death"

"PS4 blue light of death" returns 101 results.

Quite a lot for one very particular phrasing, actually.

I didn't mean to imply that there were millions of postings about the PS4 problems, just that the problem signified by a blue flashing light is apparently now pretty well-known. It's not just the Amazon posters talking about it; the issue isn't the overheating indication, it's something else.

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.

True!

...or maybe they never had a reason to post a review until paying hundreds of dollars for a DOA console for which the company is apparently not being very accommodating?

A verified review is when amazon confirm the person bought it from Amazon. Meaning they definitely paid for the product.

> 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.

Which does not change the fact that it is dead on arrival for the customer.

I read a comment earlier that made a good point that unlike the console launches of the previous generation in 2004-2006, we now have access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to vocalize and demonstrate our complaints worldwide.

It makes the vocal minority much more vocal.

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.

We know that at least 323 received a broken PS4. At least 492 received a working PS4.

I would guess that 1/10 would write a review when the PS4 is broken and 1/1000 would write a review regardless.

Also we don't know if these are real reviews or just 323 Microsoft employees who were given money to order the PS4 and then post a bad review :P

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 to write a review about it.

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.

The people who received working PS4s are playing them.

There are also other possible reasons for negative reviews. For many people who used only Xbox before just look of interface of PS could be a shock.

If after using only xbox, you bought and received a PS4 from Amazon, would you leave a 1 star ranking because of the interface look? 3-stars, maybe; 2-stars, maybe; but if you put 1* on the first day after paying hundreds of dollars, then it means that you had some serious unexpected, unwelcome surprise.

Those of us who got a console in good condition most likely don't post. I got a launch console from Amazon & even applied the update, and it worked like a charm. I've no complaints so far (minus the horrid launch lineup).

As I recall, RROD complaints were quite strident after the Xbox 360 came out, on blogs, gaming sites, comment sections of news articles, and the early social sites (Facebook was big among the college crowd at that time, and Friendster, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc. were active discussion areas as well). Most gamers were aware of the issue. Microsoft's return policy and eventual fixes helped change public perception.

You make it sound as if user-submitted content didn't exist before 2006. There were still forums at that time. Gamespot, IGN, and GameFAQs all had forums. NeoGAF existed, as did Joystiq, Kotaku, and 1UP, and they were all just as news-savvy as they are today.

A lot of things have changed since 2006, there's no denying it, but the gaming industry has always been ahead of the curve, and the social circles are much the same today as they have been for the last fifteen years.

Manufacturing defect with the HDMI port is causing damage to HDMI cables. Amazon should really send an email out about it to people who ordered, there is an easy fix.

What's the fix?

Kotaku documented it, push down the HDMI pin with something.

Yeah this is the link http://kotaku.com/good-news-about-our-once-broken-ps4-146481...

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 PS4 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 posted a 1-star comment, Amazon sold between 6,460 and 10,766 PS4 units.

I would hope the failure rate is closer to 0.4% than to 4.0%, but I can't even hazard a guess at Amazon's sales volume, so this is where the hard numbers stop.

(ps. I didn't check my math closely and I'm walking out the door, feel free to correct me in replies and I'll edit later to reflect.)

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.

I had the RROD with an XBox and they were _very_ quick getting it back. I think it was a couple of days. It's still an inconvenience, but it was also after more than a year of use.

Ctl-Alt-Del is referring to this as the "Pulsing Blue Dick-Punch of Death". I think everyone should do everything they can to spread that term. It's too good to pass up.

Unless you lived right by, and I mean next door, to the refurb place I believe in Texas, it was never a few days. A few weeks maybe. I've had a Xbox 360 since launch go through 2 rrod's (so not really the same console) and at best it was 2 weeks to Georgia. They handled everything but shipping was never 2/3 day or better either way. I haven't had a return in 2-3 years now so maybe they got soooo good at the end that changed but I never remember it being that quick. MS also finally owned up to and corrected a serious design flaw. I don't expect the same from Sony just yet. You'll at least get them looking at it in the same manner initially. It behooves everyone for them to check it out and refurbish first, then just replace as they determine the root cause.

I must not play my 360 enough but I have one of the originalish white 360's bought at the same time as others (not day one, but before any of the fixes) and never had a RROD.

But now that I say that online watch it die the next time I turn it on. Glad I never had to send it in because Minnesota is a skosh farther than Georgia.

I live in Poland and had a white one RROD after about 11 months. Everybody told me: it'll take weeks. So I sent it in and went out and got myself one of the slim ones. Five or six days after a courier came to pick it up, another one came to drop it off. It'd go to Germany, been fixed and sent back to the Poland in under a week.

I forgot about that point. At some stage they would send you a refurb as you likely "proved" you sent yours in. They knew they would replace it so sometimes it would come back stupid quick. In all but the last of mine, I got the same unit back which likely accounts for the delays. They, and I as well, likely preferred letting us keep the same unit for warranty, live, etc purposes as the "move my stuff to a new Xbox" wasn't terribly fun to do, much less any more than once.

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: '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 caused by assembly errors, some caused by damage during assembly, some due to component failures, but the vast majority were caught before the trucks were loaded. One guy with a rolling swivel chair and several industrial-sized KVM switches can verify that 500 (what you might expect for several computer labs across a single school district, for school districts the size we were dealing with) or so PCs will more or less work in really just a few minutes. I would assert that this sort of manual sanity checking is the sort of operation that is embarrassingly parallelizable too. Two people can check a batch of 1000 just as fast as one person can check 500. 20 people should be able to do 10,000.

And this was a small operation. Were we larger, it may have made sense to look into more automation.

Between those checks, and when they were hauled into schools and plugged in? Nothing much about a tractor trailer ride is going to make a PC go DOA.

So I guess my question is, what sort of QA are they doing at the factory to get a 4-5% DOA rate? 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?

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?"

Famous Xbox 360 problem (RROD) was not on arrival. So probably they mentioned this 4-5% statistics for some period of time, not for DOA.

Ah, that would make a bit more sense.

Not that this happened with my fiancé's PS4, but OnTrac (a CA/NV? local carrier that Amazon often uses) has employees with an infuriating habit of throwing packages over gates.

And I don't mean soft padded envelopes that really won't suffer from being thrown over the gate, but boxes including (from the last six months) computer equipment, a sunrise alarm clock, glass canning jars, bottles containing liquids, and more. hurled about 8 feet (to clear the gate) and down onto the stone behind it. The place I lived at before, they threw a box hard enough to leave a mark on the door. Then I have to waste my time complaining to OnTrac and Amazon about the broken glass and non-functioning equipment and return and replace it hoping the next delivery guy doesn't screw it up. Some days I feel like Amazon uses too much padding for something so trivial, and then I realize I have to deal with OnTrac and then there cannot be enough padding for my packages.

I will not be surprised at all if the DOA rate takes into account factors like that.

OnTrac likes to just leave packages in front of my door. On Market Street in San Francisco and mark the packages signed by "Door." Once in a while they'll ring the doorbell, but often I'll just find it there. So far, no one has stolen anything, but boy does it make me nervous.

Oh man. I live on Market too. OnTrac has done that same exact thing before, and sometimes I only discover it because someone passing on the street or a neighbor rings my doorbell to let me know I have a box outside. They also don't seem to be able to read, as they will accidentally deliver packages to xx30 when we're xx20 and vice versa.

I hate them so much. I go out of my way to leave terrible feedback for shipping on every OnTrac package I get at this point. Their reps keep telling me they're not going to do it any more and still it's such terrible service that I would cancel Prime membership if it wasn't for most packages being delivered by UPS/FedEx/USPS.

Here on the East coast we have LaserShip, which sounds like pretty much the same deal. They once delivered my package to a city 30 miles away to a family with a completely different name. Amazon loves to use them here too. It's a bit distressing that they don't exercise better oversight over their shippers, given how central that is to their business model.

I have had lasership make mistakes couple of times (dropping of at the neighbors, claiming no answer when never attempted).. I complained to amazon about the shipping and I have not received any shipment from them via Lasership after that. I am a prime member though. (not sure if that changes)..

LaserShip's been pretty good to me. They're the only delivery service that actually calls my cell to let me know the package is here (I WFH and can sign for it, and the intercom's been busted since I moved in).

You're also assuming everyone with a dead unit bothered to post a review

I'd say that the distribution is likely that most of the people with a dead unit posted reviews, while most of the people who received a working unit have not (and are likely still playing it).

People are far more likely to complain than to praise, and a dead unit arriving for a fairly expensive hot commodity is definitely cause for complaint, especially for something people are so passionate about as a PS4.

I'd be eager to see how many of those low ratings were due to people who took the day off to play it and couldn't.

Also, no way that 100% of bad orders came in and have a review. The old rubric was that for every vocal complaining customer (forums, reviews, etc) there are 7-10 in the wings not complaining. So I would say that you can't really draw conclusions simply based on the reviews, unless you want to inflate them by an order of magnitude.

I'm quite surprised you came to that number given this announcement by sony.

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PS4-Failure-Rate-0-4-Says-S...

If it were just the industry standard failure rate then we should have seen a similar pattern of bad reviews for the other recent console launches. I don't know if that happened or not, but I think you're making it a bit too easy just blaming it on the standard failure rate.

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

"Presuming ... that 100% of DOA customers posted a 1-star comment"

Compare the stats on Dec 24th to Dec 26th, I bet they'll be an interesting change.

Christmas is only like 5 weeks away; its not like they released in June or something. A very large fraction of PS4 shipped probably are covered in gift wrapping paper right now.

Bonus points if they had the sense to ship a one month warranty five weeks before christmas... it might be bad, but it can't be that bad, or can it?

There appears to be multiple issues going on that are probably all being filed under the console being bricked. HDMI seems to be causing problems where the console won't show a picture but everything internally is still working. There is also a safe mode you can go into that is fixing the issue for some. And finally there are some that are really just bricked which is probably accurate to the 0.4% rate that Sony claimed.

Also FWIW I received one from Amazon and everything worked fine out of the box.

From an Amazon review:

You can return it to Amazon or Call Sony @ 1(800)345-7669 to schedule a replacement. Mine is broken like everyone elses.

If your console light turns white (and doesn't get stuck at pulsating blue), it could be the HDMI cable or connection issue. Fix with a pin (see Kotaku's article).

If it stays blue and pulsates, try safe mode (turn off system completely, then hold down power for 10 sec and wait till you hear beeps). From here Sony can help you troubleshoot if you wanted to call in. If it wont even boot to safe mode, it's bricked. You can try to troubleshoot on your own if you're adventurous: 1. Hold down power button until the unit powers off and the light goes out. This took about 10 seconds. 2. From power off, enter Safe Mode by holding down the power button until you hear beeps. Release power button after the second beep. The Safe Mode menu will appear with a list of options. 3. Select Option 4 to restore PS4 to factory defaults. Once it's done, the system will restart. 4. In our case, after the reboot, the PS4 automatically entered Safe Mode. This time, they had us select Option 6 to Initialize the PS4. Note that by doing this, you will lose profiles and settings so just be aware that you are basically starting over. Once it's done, the system will restart. 5. When the PS4 comes back up, it will take you through the initial setup again as if it's being booted for the first time.

If you can't get the PS4 to boot into safe mode, it's not your HDMI port. it's an internal issue and you'll have to send it to Sony to be fixed.

This is the article relating to the pin:

http://kotaku.com/tips-for-using-the-playstation-4-146522878...

"A thin piece of metal in the port got raised when we put an HDMI cable in—at least that's what we think happened. A Sony official fixed the unit by pushing the metal down with a pin."

That's just how Xbox people think.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s17e07-black-f...

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

At least you know right away that they're dead.

It'd be more annoying 6 months down the road.

Or worse, the Xbox 360 RROD issue, which was an inevitable ticking time bomb that could blow at any time.

Why worse? Weren't the rrod Xboxes replaced by Microsoft? PS4 has not made any public announcement that I know of.

And how many years did it take for Microsoft to come to that decision? Exactly.

The RROD was really crappy, for sure. But ultimately MS did do do the right thing, or at least they tried. On the other hand, Sony has never stood behind their consoles. From the PS1 cd drive wearing out prematurely [0], to the PSP's analog nub falling off[1] to PS2 disc read errors [2] to... on and on. Sony has never once helped the consumer in these situations. For most Playstation owners, buying multiple systems per generation is just part of owning a Playstation.

[0] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#Hardware_...

[1] -- http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9761604-1.html

[2] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playstation_2#Disc_Read_Error_....

The fact that I have never even heard of those issues probably says something in itself.

that you are ignorant?

I'll rephrase: The fact that I was previously ignorant of widespread hardware failures of Sony hardware probably says something itself.

Hell, I'll spell it out for you: those issues were not in the same league as the Xbox 360 failures. Even non-gamers, such as myself, are aware of the 360 RROD. There are fucking Cracked articles about it for crying out loud.

A mechanic might know that a 2005 Toyota Tacoma has an issue where the fizzbuzz widget wears out after too many miles... Everybody knows that the Ford Pinto had an issue. The 360 RROD was Microsoft's Pinto.

Perhaps you're younger than me? I was in college when the PS1 was in its prime. I literally know of no one (both personally and on the internet) from that time that didn't buy at least two PSXs, if not three. The PSXs poor reliability was a huge deal and controversy at the time. The PS2's poor reliability was enough to warrant a class action lawsuit (that Sony lost).

I've not kept up on PS3 reliability, as when my PS2 died, I decided to never buy another Sony product again.

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 corporation for plenty of other reasons. All I'm saying here is that Microsoft's 360 problems are in a class of their own (it is too early to say if the PS4 will match or exceed the 360 issues, perhaps it will).

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 doesn't care.

The PS4 already having quality issues is not a surprise at all. Yet the Xbox One having quality issues would surprise me. And that is where the difference lies.

I thought you don't have knowledge about PS3 reliability?

How can you say that every Playstation generation has been "plagued with issues"? You're ignoring their most recent efforts.

> 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.]

Don't forget the original PSP had an extremely high rate of stuck pixels in their displays.

And while I have had multiple RRODs with the 360, I have all working 360s via replacement, while my YLOD (Yellow Light of Death) PS3 is dead without replacement.

Haha, I remember: They even went to say that if you had less than 5 dead pixels (IIRC) even if they were in the middle of the screen, they would not replace your unit, because it was under the limit of "acceptable" dead pixels.

"Sony has never stood behind their consoles."

This statement is false.

When SONY was hacked we all received identity theft protection and 2 free (good) games.

Fair enough, they did do that. Not quite the same situation, but still a good example of them responding.

Idk, I've never had that happen, while some people have had it happen over and over. From my perspective, it doesn't seem any more inevitable than the console becoming obsolete.

Really? I've had that happen on five different units I (or my brothers) have owned. Given, after our first "new" one rrod'd, we started buying refurbs. From what I've seen, though, it really is inevitable, and I've just started expecting them to die at some random point. My current one has lasted two years, though.

How is it inevitable, my launch xbox360 has been running nearly continuously since it hit my porch on launch day.

Amazon's packaging also seems to leave something to be desired: http://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/1qrawl/this_is_how_my_b....

Official Amazon packaging video from that Reddit thread shows problem with lack of cushioning on bottom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSHX-iHJEWM

There may well be widespread issues but this link just shows that some people have issues which given the volume of PS4s was kind of a given.

If the failure rate was as high as the Amazon reviews suggest it seems like there would be more news about this even from the mainstream non-tech media by now. Lots of people get pretty fanatical about video game brands so I personally wouldn't trust any of the Amazon reviews good or bad. Remember Amazon allows anyone to write a review of any product -- purchased or not.

> there would be more news about this even from the mainstream non-tech media by now.

"By now"? It's one day after release on a weekend.

There are some rumors claiming that interns at Foxconn sabotaged a few PS4s: http://corruptedcartridge.com/ps4-sabotaged-news/

Was it better on previous models ? I wonder Sony isn't suffering from off-sourcing issues. Instead of in-house easily controlled circuitry, the cheaper off-the-shelf approach might cause higher rates of failures.

Seems like the fact they sold 1 million units in 24 hours in NA alone should put these DOA failures into perspective. It's a tiny, tiny number of consoles not working vs those that are.

Don't they do burn-in tests on consoles so they know it works before it ships?

If this is the ps4 launch imagine the xbox one...

So rushing to stand on the cutting edge might result in bloody feet - whoda thunk it?

I don't think something as super-mass-market as a gaming console qualifies as "cutting edge". (You could make an argument for the PS3's Cell processor, I suppose, but that's hardly relevant here.)

doesnt this happen release cycle ?

MS PR in action?

They've got previous: http://m.slashdot.org/story/181735

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