The author is conflating a different contemporaneous issue of the PS3 (YLOD) with the XBox 360. It wasn't "capacitors". Further, I would argue it wasn't monocau

The author is conflating a different contemporaneous issue of the PS3 (YLOD) with the XBox 360. It wasn't "capacitors". Further, I would argue it wasn't monocausal but a big finger can be pointed at thermal cycling fatigue. In broad strokes, a number of issues caused the Red Ring of Death ("general hardware failure") but the most dominant/infamous one was eventually attributed to a cross-domain electro-mechanical issue causing connections to break in the GPU interposer from thermal cycling in the first generation xbox gpu chips (made at a 90nm process node) which were rushed to market and fixed with second generation chips (made at 65nm process node)[1]. Initial attempts to individually address the solder, heat delta (by reducing the max temperture), and mechanical design of these chips did not fix the issue. Ultimately all three had to be sorted. The "towel trick" worked by making the resin in the PCB temporarily more pliant - allowing the x-clamp to reseat the gpu and temporarily re-bridging these broken connections on the GPU and to a lesser extant the CPU. Similar idea when swapping out a stronger "x-clamp" - aftermarket or with washers. Old leadership was given two shots to fix this initially and failed with Zephyr[early 2007] and Falcon[late 2007] generations which were best efforts given the cruel reality that GPU architecture turnaround time of around 2 to 3 years. Ultimately the fix had to come from three sources: ATI (new chips), replacing Peter Moore with Don Mattrick (new leadership and comms), and new hardware revision (Jasper[2008]). Earlier attempts to "replace the lead-free solder with a different formulation" in 2007 were ineffective in addressing the problem. Fundamentally it was a calculated gamble - Moore got a huge (albeit short-sighted) win for himself and Microsoft doubled their game console market share by pushing their vendors and themselves to compromise their release engineering schedule. It's debatable if they would have captured more share by running a more diligent process - probably no - given the issues were initially latent and didn't manifest for a few years, but certainly they would have lost less market share later on in 2008 and 2009. They couldn't, for instance, have known the PS3 would be so expensive at launch nor that the Wii would be such a sleeper hit in an untapped market segment. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2d6IMBS8oY&t=1130s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2d6IMBS8oY&t=1130s