Xbox Failure Rate Causes Sony and Nintendo's Rise to the Top

Xbox 360 failure rates worse than most consumer electronics
A new report by warranty-sellers SquareTrade puts the defect rate of the Xbox 360 at 16.4 percent. That's a bit above average for consumer electronics after three or four years (the 360 has been out a little more than two), but much higher than the Nintendo Wii or Sony PlayStation 3.

So with this kind of failure rate why do I still hear only horror stories about the PS3 freezing and catching fire problems? Sony and Nintendo's rates hover in the 3% area while Microsoft plunges head first into 16%.

The damned company can't even work out the bugs in their own hardware and 3rd party support still goes almost exclusively to them? I think that part of the problem is consumers are no longer checking the hard facts before purchasing a product.

For a while now the only argument has been the price point on each of the systems, but the line is starting to blur as Sony changes up their system and Wii adds more online features. But with stats like this I can't understand why a consumer wouldn't want to pay more for a better product anyway. Apparently we are getting what we pay for!