Has your 360 suffered the infamous Red Ring of Death yet? It’s horribly painful when it happens but at least Microsoft is doing the decent thing and is fixing them for free. And, boy, has it cost them!

Go on, then, take a guess - how much has Microsoft spent fixing busted ’Boxes and ferrying them to and from frustrated punters in the last 12 months? You couldn’t possibly be close since the actual amount rivals a small nation’s World Bank debt - a simply staggering 1.15 billion dollars, or £738,000,000. In a word, jeepers!

According to noted Xbox-watcher Dean Takahashi in today’s Tech Guardian hurried development and poor production quality lie behind the colossal failure rate. Basically Microsoft engineers overstretched themselves in starting hardware development almost a year after Sony began work on the PS3 - and, of course, the Xbox 360 launched around a year earlier too. Thus corners were cut in haste and the rest, as they say, is history.

By all accounts early tests revealed that the Xbox 360 was flawed but Microsoft didn’t delay the launch believing that problems could be fixed retrospectively. “Their thinking shows that they are a software company at heart,” says an unnamed veteran manufacturing source. “They put something out and figure they can fix it with the next patch or come up with a bug fix.” Whatever the case, at one point in 2005 the aggregate defect rate of machines rolling off the production lines was as high as 68%.

Well, there’s not a lot we can say about that really…