“Remember the Red Ring of Death? Now it’s the Disc Drive of Doom as dreaded console issues come back to haunt Microsoft after it has admitted Xbox One owners are experiencing problems with the disc drive,” News.com.au reports.
“The new Xbox One launched only days ago, breaking sales records and shipping over one million units in 24 hours,” News.com.au reports. “But now hundreds of users are complaining of a faulty disc drive that is noisy or cannot even read discs.”
“Reports of the Disc Drive of Doom issue came flooding into games website Kotaku where they received over ‘150 emails from people whose systems were affected,'” News.com.au reports. “With the global launch of PS4 on November 29, this is the last thing Microsoft wants when faced by millions of gamers who are weighing up the difficult decision to buy either an Xbox One or PS4.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Par for the Microsoft course.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “rudi” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Microsoft’s Kinect blamed for ‘red ring of death’ Xbox 360 failures – January 5, 2011
How Xbox 360 ‘red ring of death’ debacle cost Microsoft $1.15 billion last year alone – November 12, 2008
Pioneer Press reviews Apple TV 2.0: A joy to use (works flawlessly, unlike Microsoft’s Xbox Live) – February 27, 2008
Serious flaws in Xbox 360 hardware to cost Microsoft at least $1 billion – July 06, 2007
Analyst Ehrenberg: Microsoft’s Xbox 360: Failure-in-a-Box – April 18, 2007
Microsoft sued over defective Xbox 360 consoles, suit alleges units prone to freeze ups, overheating – December 05, 2005
Anything made by Microsoft is crap
Don’t be so smug. Tim Cook publicly apologized for the cluster fuck of Apple Maps.
Are you comparing a free app to a $400 console Mr. Death?
Lets see apologizing for a product that was barely flawed (every mapping program I have ever used has similar errors in it’s database) Vs Microsoft turning out disaster after disaster and never even admitting they might could have done a better job?
And whom was it that you said shouldn’t be smug? (or at least not trolling Apple news sites)
Digging deep for that comparison Red. That’s a comparison similar to saying a Toaster Oven I got as a free gift has a broil feature that doesn’t always broil reliably vs. it’s the dead of winter and the furnace I just paid a chunk of money for is now completely non-functional shortly after installation.
dork!
Maps has taken over Google maps. So I would not call that a fuck up, more like a hiccup. So not even a good comparison.
Not everything. First XBOX was rock solid. XB 360 was an amazing architecture horribly implemented (corners cut everywhere to save costs). The MS keyboards and mice are among the best. Not everything, just some things.
Doom is yet another perfect four letter word describing all things Microsoft.
This is what they get for ripping off the Sega Dreamcast. M$’$ greedy decision to work against Sega, and not with them, blew up in their faces. The entire family of XBox machines are still inferior to the original, much superior, Sega Dreamcast. But we all know about Microsoft’s habit of ripping off good ideas, and making them much more worse. (Zune, Windowze, Wondoze Phone, Kin, Surface, I could go on forever…)
I still have a dreamcast and you are on drugs.
Nope. First XBOX was better, 360 even more so. I still have my Dreamcast and always liked it (while it was supported). BTW that whole conspiracy about Sega is blown out of proportion.
You forgot Microsoft 95, Apple 89.
Microsoft doesn’t make hard drives. I’m wondering if the problem rest with the drive manufacture or something Microsoft did on their end.
Does anyone know if they are name brand drives or are they the cheapest off brand drives they could find?
It isn’t the hard drive, but the Blu-Ray drives that are having the issues. I immediately wanted to think that it was a Sony unit and that Sony sabotaged MS, but I’ve read that the drives are made by Philips.
Either way, looks like MS has their usual QC policies in place – unless the number of affected devices is very small, they should have caught that they had a bad batch of optical drives delivered somewhere along the line.
A few can slip through, sure, but…
Phillips? That explains everything then. They aren’t exactly known for quality…
I’m still trying to figure out why it has either a hard or BR disc drive.
Bringing you 2005’s technology, TODAY!
If only they stuck with the floppy drive…
I got screwed by the overheating POS Xbox 360. I’ll be damned if I let them screw me again.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Yes but MS fixed those problems (replaced units) even long after warranty expired and 360 got better (more reliable) with time. At least they stood by their product, fixed the source of the problems (via hardware revisions) and replaced damaged units.
the point is that they shouldn’t have a problem that big to where they had to do a big recall. Yeah it was nice that they did that, but they knew that if they didn’t they would end up having to drop the xbox completely from microsoft because they would have lost so many customers.
I am as big an Apple fanboy of anyone, but this isn’t another reason to bash Microsoft. I’m still wondering why Apple hasn’t done anything with AppleTV – seeing full-screen video conferencing on TV on the Xbox one makes me wonder why Apple didn’t do that five years ago. I like and use AppleTV now, but the Xbox is certainly more ambitious and useful.
“…but this isn’t another reason to bash Microsoft…”
jeez, Paul, you’re taking away our reason to live.
Exactly. Bad enough Ballmer is leaving.
lol
I can think of one reason – capacity. With FaceTime calls routed through Apple servers, if they outfitted another million or more endpoints for FaceTime calls, the quality would possibly suffer. Sure, technically it would be possible for them to stick a camera into an AppleTV and add the FaceTime app, but what about sound? How would they ensure a quality sound experience? These other companies care less about the end-user experience, so I think that’s why Apple is taking it very slow. They want to make sure the experience is exception.
Also, they would need to redesign the AppleTV software to support multiple iCloud accounts for a whole family. Unlike phones and tablets, that are usually used by a single person, the AppleTV is used by a whole family, so how would one identify themselves to the system when making or receiving a call? There’s lots of issues like this that one must think about before saying “Why hasn’t Apple done this yet?”
Netflix figured out how to handle multiple users on one AppleTV … and it works brilliantly.
Dating myself: like a home phone number, create a free iTunes account for your house.
One way I have thought of is a user uses their iOS device as the Apple TV remote. The users device would pass users information to the Apple TV relative to that user.
If you’re going to use an iPhone as a remote, just use the iPhone to make the FaceTime call – preferably in another room so I can watch the movie I’m streaming from my iMac!
The decision between Xbox and PlayStation should be very simple: Nintendo Wii!
PS4 had launch issues as well. DOA out of the box.
This is such an opportunity for apple TV to take over. We just need the right software developers to bring their products to iOS.
What exactly is such a disc drive good for?
Nothing 🙂
A lot of games are still sold on disc. First day purchasers of XBox One (what a stupid name!) received three games on disc. The drive is also supposed to be usable for watching Blu-ray movie discs. IOW: Optical discs aren’t quite dead yet.
Ugh. Thanks, Obama.
Another classic rushed product launch from Microsoft!
It’s the launch of Surface, and the red ring of death all over again.
I feel sorry for the mugs (customers) who have bought this console. Microsoft can do some good things but they rush the products out to market and don’t care about the details – which is why they fail time and time again.
I’d get a PS4 if I were you.
Everything Microsoft does is crap and everything Apple does is great. I love Apple and I want to have Tim Cook’s babies. And i love the smell of my own farts.
Alrighty then!
Bet your weekends are lonely.
This is interesting because the teardowns reveal that the xbone is a hobby kit of bits stuffed in a box – I mean, they just bought off the shelf components, had no interest in design, form or factor and made the box 30% larger – even without attempting to fit an enormous, heavy and hot PSU brick inside the console. So, you get to think that this is just the outcome of M$ nickel and diming over component costs – in a machine that costs $100 more than the competition.
You might have thought the PS4 custom it Blu Ray drive would have been the riskier strategy, but no, M$ never fail to suprise themselves.
Um, I call BS. They certainly did not hobble together off the shelf components. The part I find suspicious is that PS4 and XBOne have almost identical specs (CPU & GPU technology etc.).
Love my XBox One! It’s one helluva machine and pushes the console genre forward in some pretty cool ways.
Ish happens. Man up.
I guess I missed the earlier article that outlined the issues the PS4 launch units were experiencing (bricked, blue light of death, PSN problems). I’m sure that’s just an oversight.
I was ready to pull the trigger on a new XBOX One over the weekend, but without an NHL game, and a good button mashing fighting game I realized I just wouldn’t be playing it very often. I’ll hang on to the 360 for a while longer until the game titles start filling in the areas I like – Hockey, Fighting, Racing, Batman, Halo (though CoD:Ghosts looks awesome).
Now I’ll wait for the titles to fill out, and the manufacturing issues to be straightened out.
If ‘Doom’ were a color, what color would that be?
Let’s see, BLUE screen of death.
RED ring of death
Disc Drive of Doom (color?)
‘The colorful Apple logo was used at the launch of the Apple II and that the colors in the logo were there because of the Apple II’s colorful possibilities. Steve Jobs who came up with the idea with the colors ended up specifying several of the hues.’
Guess MS will need a new multicolor logo to express product crashes…
If I had the choice it would be a play station hands down! My PS3 one of the older models is still working perfectly. I got my PS3 while others bought the defective X-Box and they had there’s serviced 5 or 6 times.
Déjà Vu all over again.