Microsoft Is Selling An Xbox 360 Red Ring Of Death Ugly Sweater, But You Can’t Have It
The festive season is right here, and as is custom, folks have dusted off their ugliest sweaters to assist have fun this jolly time of the yr. Over at Microsoft, workers are entering into the swing of issues with an unsightly sweater that celebrates one of many ugliest moments of Xbox historical past: the notorious crimson ring of loss of life that plagued the Xbox 360 early in its console lifecycle.
Along with an influence button that may show each the inexperienced and the crimson symbols, the sweater additionally has an fascinating association of inexperienced and yellow stripes. As noticed by The Verge, it is solely at present out there to Microsoft workers via the corporate’s retailer, and inventory has already bought out.
Anybody who owned an Xbox 360 early on doubtless skilled a crimson ring of loss of life {hardware} failure, as this was a widespread subject that turned the console right into a paperweight. This was a serious downside for Microsoft on the time, and within the 2021 internet collection Energy On, the corporate defined the way it occurred.
In accordance with Leo Del Castillo, a member of Xbox’s {hardware} engineering group, the crimson ring of loss of life was attributable to connectors contained in the console’s elements that broke on account of speedy heating and cooling. This problem–combined with thermal and stress points within the Xbox 360 associated to its soldering balls–eventually resulted in bricked consoles.
Microsoft’s answer on the time was to restore and return the affected Xbox 360 for gratis to the consumer–an costly repair that turned a “1.15 billion greenback downside” based on former head of Xbox Peter Moore. Future {hardware} revisions of the Xbox 360 largely managed to stop this subject from occurring, and successor consoles just like the Xbox One and Xbox Sequence X|S have not confronted any main {hardware} failures on this scale.
