It’s that time of year again when everyone pulls out their quirky sweaters to enjoy the holiday cheer.
At Microsoft, they’ve created a unique sweater that reminds us of a not-so-great moment in Xbox‘s past: the dreaded red ring of death from the Xbox 360 days. This sweater has a power button that lights up in both green and red, along with stripes in green and yellow. The Verge spotted it, but it’s only available to Microsoft employees, and it’s already gone from the shelves.
Back in the day, many Xbox 360 owners faced the red ring of death, which turned their gaming consoles into fancy doorstops. This was a big headache for Microsoft, and they explained the whole story in their 2021 web series, Power On.
Leo Del Castillo from Xbox’s hardware team shared that the issue happened because connectors inside the console would break due to quick heating and cooling. This, mixed with some problems with the soldering balls, led to many broken Xbox 360s.
Fans often wonder if big companies really learn from their mistakes.
Microsoft’s fix was to repair and send back the broken consoles for free, which cost them a whopping “1.15 billion dollar problem,” as Peter Moore, the former Xbox boss, put it. Later versions of the Xbox 360 mostly avoided this mess, and newer consoles like the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S haven’t had such huge hardware troubles.
