I was reading this excellent article over the weekend; if you didn’t see it making the rounds, now’s your chance to hear the inside story on the Xbox 360′s troubled youth. While hard facts on failure rates are scarce (no surprise there), there’s enough collateral information to make clear that the 360 was at best a triumph of engineers under the worst of conditions, and at worst a complete catastrophe on multiple levels.

The article is super long but there is a lot of interesting info you may have missed, from the way console makers rely on increasing yield rates to the changes in each new batch of 360s. It’s good reading for anyone interested in the consumer technology business.