The festive season is upon us, and as is customary, people have pulled out their ugliest sweaters to mark this joyful time of year. Microsoft employees are embracing the spirit with an ugly sweater that commemorates one of the most infamous moments in Xbox history: the notorious red ring of death that plagued the Xbox 360 during its early years.
The sweater features a power button that can display both green and crimson symbols, along with an intriguing pattern of green and yellow stripes. As reported by The Verge, this exclusive item is currently only available to Microsoft employees through the company's store, and stocks have already sold out.
Early Xbox 360 owners are likely familiar with the red ring of death hardware failure, a widespread issue that rendered the console useless. This was a significant challenge for Microsoft at the time, and the company delved into the details of the problem in the 2021 web series Power On.
According to Leo Del Castillo, a member of Xbox's hardware engineering team, the red ring of death was caused by connectors within the console's components that failed due to rapid heating and cooling cycles. This, combined with thermal and stress issues related to the Xbox 360's soldering balls, ultimately led to bricked consoles.
Microsoft's response was to repair and return the affected Xbox 360 consoles at no cost to consumers, a costly solution that former head of Xbox Peter Moore referred to as a "1.15 billion dollar problem." Subsequent hardware revisions of the Xbox 360 largely addressed this issue, and later consoles like the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S have not experienced similar widespread hardware failures.
Source link: https://www.gamespot.com
