Real failure rate?

Boogle · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:14

I posted this in another thread, and found it profound enough to share with ppl not participating in said thread.

A washing machine fails in this country every 5 minutes. Washing machines must have an awfully high failure rate. (60 / 5) * 24 * 365 = 105,120 wachine machines dead each year.

When you say one fails every 5 minutes, it sounds like a massive number doesn't it? But when you work it out, it ends up being 'only' 105,120 machines in a whole year.

Now given that we know 500,000 X360s were sold in Europe in December, that means 12,500 should have failed (2.5% failure rate).

12500 / 31 (days) = 403.2 failures each day.
Thats 16.8 X360s failing each hour. Or one X360 failing every 3.57 minutes (60 / 16.8).

Now when you consider to have a failure rate HALF of the electronic standard (standard is 5%, MS once said it was a 2.5% return rate iirc), an X360 had to fail every 3.57 minutes during December, is it a wonder so many threads popped up?

Firestar_3x · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:21

Nice, people just jump on the band wagon cause its MS, i think they have done a great job with the 360 personally as stated by the % failure rates.

NokkonWud · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:25

Nothing like fighting an argument with simple mathematics. Well done

.

dirtydog · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:30

Firestar_3x said:
Nice, people just jump on the band wagon cause its MS, i think they have done a great job with the 360 personally as stated by the % failure rates.

Where are the failure rates then and are they accurate? Also I think you are wrong to say that everyone criticising is anti-MS. That is a silly thing to say IMO.

LoadsaMoney · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:38

Well considering theres absolutely millions upon millions of washing machines churned out every day, then yes the failure rate would be high, when the 360 was released there was something like what a couple of hundred thousand, and yet look at the failuire rate, 35 on here alone, god forbid if they made about 10 million to ship on launch day, we would probably have about 5 million users just on here alone with faulty ones.

Firestar_3x · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:42

dirtydog said:
Where are the failure rates then and are they accurate? Also I think you are wrong to say that everyone criticising is anti-MS. That is a silly thing to say IMO.

Open your eyes and look around so many people are anti MS its untrue, thats hard simple fact much like those figures above. ******Edit, i didn't say eveyone with something bad to say about the 360 was doing so cause they are anti MS.

As for the washing machine thing we are talking % so it don't matter if you looked at 10 million washing machines and only 5 million 360's its the percentage of total units that fails, thats the bottom line figure.

Boogle · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:45

LoadsaMoney said:
Well considering theres absolutely millions upon millions of washing machines churned out every day, then yes the failure rate would be high, when the 360 was released there was something like what a couple of hundred thousand, and yet look at the failuire rate, 35 on here alone, god forbid if they made about 10 million to ship on launch day, we would probably have about 5 million users just on here alone with faulty ones.

As Firestar_3x said, we're looking at percentages here, it doesn't matter if a billion X360s were in circulation, the failure rate in % would be the same. If you looked at my post you would see:

For a 2.5% failure rate, an X360 had to fail every 3.57 minutes during December in Europe alone

LoadsaMoney · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:50

I think for the amount of 360's that were released the failure rate is appaling, as i said above what would it be like if they managed to churn out 10 million for release day, 360's are going down day in day out, and thats out out of a couple of hundred thousand, there still in shortage, you still can't just walk in and pick one up, yet if you want a washing machine .........

Percentages mean diddly squat to me, whos to say what the failure rate would be if they released a billion, that would mean more going down, so the failure rate could be the same, or it could rise as they may be more faulty ones churned out, we just don't know as they only released a piddly amount.

FeFiDoh · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:50

Im guessing by now there are a lot more then just the "launch" 360s sold as im seeing em just bout every shop i go into now and being told they are selling fast. So that % should be falling at the minute?

Firestar_3x · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:51

LoadsaMoney said:
I think for the amount of 360's that were released the failure rate is appaling, as i said above what would it be like if they managed to churn out 10 million for release day, 360's are going down day in day out, and thats out out of a couple of hundred thousand, there still in shortage, you still can't just walk in and pick one up, yet if you want a washing machine .........

Thats fair enough but if you phoned up to washing machine maker or the place you got it from i get it would take longer than a few days to pick yours up and get a new one out to you....

dirtydog · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:52

Boogle there are a number of flaws in your mathematical reasoning but I can't be bothered to take the time to point them out, perhaps someone else would like to

LoadsaMoney · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:56

Firestar_3x said:
Thats fair enough but if you phoned up to washing machine maker or the place you got it from i get it would take longer than a few days to pick yours up and get a new one out to you....

Yes but you would'nt be on to your 4th machine in a matter of days, as they only lasted about 1 wash would you.

dirtydog · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:58

Also consoles are a tad easier to ship than washing machines :/

The comparison with washing machines is stupid!

Firestar_3x · 14 Feb 2006 at 14:59

LoadsaMoney said:
Yes but you would'nt be on to your 4th machine in a matter of days, as they only lasted about 1 wash would you.

Personally i like unwrapping new things, its like xmas come early

Boogle · 14 Feb 2006 at 15:07

dirtydog said:
Boogle there are a number of flaws in your mathematical reasoning but I can't be bothered to take the time to point them out, perhaps someone else would like to

I can explain a few if you want

First it assumes the 2.5% failure rate is accurate, and was an accurate figure for December alone. Chances are not as many failed in December, as say January or February. It only takes into account a single month, when for an accurate picture you want at least a year. It assumes that there is an even spacing between failures - when obviously they aren't.

However, total accuracy isn't of significant importance here - what is important is bringing the failure rate into perspective. Its easy to say 'wow it must be so much higher than 2.5% with X360s going down each day', when in fact, there should be far more than a 'couple' each day, even with a low failure rate such as 2.5%.

JUMPURS · 14 Feb 2006 at 15:08

not trying to start a war, and i havent went back to out poll since about 1pm today but why dont you use the example in the other thread where, what 18/19 % of xbox 360 owners have failures
Thats 90,000 xbox360's
90000/31 = 2903 per day
which = 120 an hour
which = 2 a minute

Even if we take the sample as being 500,000 sold in dec and jan and faulures in dec/jan

90000/62 = 1451 per day
which is 60 per hour
which is one a minure.
still not rosey

We are as good a test sample as any so what makes your 2.5% (from somewhere) more accurate than the 18% (which we have polled ourselves) for here??

dirtydog · 14 Feb 2006 at 15:09

Can we trust the 2.5% figure from MS?

Boogle · 14 Feb 2006 at 15:20

LoadsaMoney said:
I think for the amount of 360's that were released the failure rate is appaling, as i said above what would it be like if they managed to churn out 10 million for release day, 360's are going down day in day out, and thats out out of a couple of hundred thousand, there still in shortage, you still can't just walk in and pick one up, yet if you want a washing machine .........

Percentages mean diddly squat to me, whos to say what the failure rate would be if they released a billion, that would mean more going down, so the failure rate could be the same, or it could rise as they may be more faulty ones churned out, we just don't know as they only released a piddly amount.

I take it you don't understand the point of percentages

Percentages 'normalize', for lack of a better word, data. By 'normalizing' different sets of data they can be compared directly. For example if I said 250 widgets were faulty, but 900 wooden legs were also faulty - you would think the wooden legs were awfully unreliable. But what if I said only 251 widgets were sold, and 9 billion wooden legs were sold?

For a bit of fun, if they did sell 10 million consoles in December, then 224 consoles would fail every minute (thats ~4 every second). That makes the X360 seem awfully unreliable, but the % of failures is the same - still 2.5%. The reason it seems so excessive is because a massive (absolutely massive) surge of products arrived on the scene at once.

Conversely, going back to 500,000 being sold in Europe - that means you have a 97.5% chance of getting a good console. Thats 487, 500 good consoles, vs. 12,500 bad ones. The chances of getting a faulty console are very, very small.

Firestar_3x · 14 Feb 2006 at 15:22

Would be interesting to have some release stats for the ps2 and % faulty units.

LoadsaMoney · 14 Feb 2006 at 15:30

I do understand, but what im saying is say M$ made 1 million 360's, 500 thousand were faulty, thats half, now whos to say if they made 2 million that there would only be 1 million faulty, half again, no one knows they might have 1.5 million faulty, is that still half, nope, it could also be less, as maybe only 1.1 million from the 2 million might have gone faulty who knows, and in which case the failure rate would go down, it can go down as well as up.