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?
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.)
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.
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 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 mean, the thing could be working on departure and dead on arrival.
"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?"
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.
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.
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.
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PS4-Failure-Rate-0-4-Says-S...
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?