The Xbox 360 has been much maligned over the years for hardware errors that have led to the dreaded Red Ring of Death. While the red light indicator has been removed from the new Xbox 360 units, Microsoft claims that the design issues that led to the errors have been ironed out for a while now.
“Believe me, it’s my least favorite thing to talk about, part of our history. I think most people agree it s become a little bit of an Internet meme now, just a thing to say,” said Albert Penello, senior director of global marketing for Xbox 360. “I feel bad for the customers that have had to go through the experiences that they’ve had, but, fundamentally, almost everybody will tell you that consoles purchased in the last two or three years, that problem doesn’t occur. It’s really people that had launch consoles and some of the early hiccups in getting those repaired and back out to people. But really, our focus over the last few years has been continuous improvement and getting the existing boxes rock steady.”
“For the most part, the overall quality problem has been fixed for a couple of years now,” continued Penello. “This [new hardware model] is an evolution of that work. The decision not to put the three red rings in it was just because it s something I want to put behind us.”
Penello indicates that a lot of time was put into making the new Xbox 360 what it is. “We launched a console in 2005, which means we’d been working on it since 2003,” said Penello. “It takes time to go through, and it s not as simple sometimes as the industry thinks it is to just add WiFi, or make it quieter. You design a box and then that design is sort of what exists. So, we went through [a lot of tests] and the teams spent a lot of time on the acoustics with the DVD drive, and the acoustics with the fan, and thinking through airflow and how to make the fan quieter, and that was really the point was, ‘Let’s just build the box that everyone just wants us to build.’
Source: IndustryGamers {link no longer active}
