The Dreaded Red Ring of Death

When I think of planned obsolescence, the first thing that comes into my mind is how Microsoft is able to take advantage of this by having a great video game system like the Xbox 360. Planned obsolescence is when a company knows that a product is going to fail in certain amount of fixed years.  Their intentions are to try and get the consumer to buy again.  So what happens when an Xbox 360 fails on consumers with the known problems called the red ring of death? What can consumers do to keep on playing? Well according to www.vgchartz.com, there has been at least 40 million Xbox 360s sold in the world, but the failure rate of the Xbox360 is 54.2% (Microsoft Blog). That tells me that there are at least 20 million Xbox 360s out there that had the red ring of death! Due to the high failure rate of these Xbox360, the first thing Microsoft decided to do is give existing customers that already purchased an Xbox 360 an extended amount of warranty of up to 3 years after the manufacture date. What do gamers do after the 3 year warranty is up? Do they have to go out there and buy a new one? The next step they decided to do was redesign the chipset which is now known as the Jasper model to try and counter any technological problems. Sure the failure rate has dropped significantly, but do consumers actually want to spend another $200 to $300 dollars in order to buy the Jasper Xbox 360.

More importantly where do these broken Xbox 360’s end up at? Sources seem to point to a landfill where Microsoft probably dumps tons and tons of broken Xbox 360’s. According to Green Peace, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 has deadly toxins such as bromine (linked to memory lost) and DEHP (which hinders sexual development). If you ask me, they did a poor job on making the system, if they would have taken their time, the situation could have been better dealt with.

http://boesky.blogspot.com/2008/08/xbox-360-number-3-planned-obsolescence.html
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/176741.asp
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-05/23/content_8235460.htm

Jesse Kim