In a seemingly polar opposite performance against IBM’s story here, Nintendo’s Switch Joycon controllers have similar issues. Almost all Joycon units will inevitably fail. Perhaps not every unit, but the failure rate is extremely high. Nintendo refuses to acknowledge the issue but will quietly offer free repairs if you report it to them, and otherwise seems to be doing a pretty great job of covering up what should have been a class action lawsuit years ago.

Perhaps it is because of the fact that the result of failure (minor to major annoyances depending on the game before being forced to eventually replace the controller) is not so nearly as catastrophic as total data loss that Nintendo has been able to skate by as long as it has. But the reactions outlined by IBM 25 years ago outlined in the article are eerily reminiscent of the actions of today’s Nintendo.

anecdote: I was working IT Support in academia when the IBM DeathStar thing was happening. We'd buy computers in batches each summer on a rolling replacement program, and one generation came in with what were, I found out later, rebranded DeathStars.

Within about 6 months most teachers, even the very non-technical ones had heard about the tick of death, and could even recognise and warn us well enough in advance that we could swap out the drives on the affected machines. The manufacturer that sold us them made sure we had a pool of replacement hard drives on hand, once it proved to be a major issue. I believe in the end we'd replaced roughly half of the hard disks over the space of the first two years of life.

Both IBM and the other company entered my shit list after that one, though in the process of writing this note I realise I've forgotten the name of the rebranding company.