Dorian wrote: With X360 and PS3, it's a design fault.
The parts used emit too much heat for such tightly-packed hardware and the soldering used is SHIT. Actually, no soldering should be used in such devices. It should be pin-based.
SLIMs are a scam. I was told this by a person who earns a living by repairing HD consoles and has a special EU certificate for working with motherboards.
Yes, they've made the CPU and GPU smaller so they should emit less heat, right? Right, but they are making the ventilation system smaller at the same time so it's back to square one in the end.
Generally speaking, SLIMs live between 2 and 4 years, depending on many factors, including the temperature fluctuation in your room.
That all comes under the "stuff's built down to a price these days" argument. And more than likely, instead of testing it in house, they just release the product onto the market and let the early adopters do the "hot test" for them. I'd go as far to say that not many things are "properly" engineered anymore, unfortunately. It doesn't help that everything is a "race" now to add more features, meaning that a whole host of complex and fairly highly stressed components are all built as cheap as possible, which as one can imagine, isn't a great mix. I'm a process engineer working in a repair centre (it doesn't do 360s or PS3s though), so see a lot of it up close. I mean I knew it before, pretty much, but was still quite shocked at the extent of it when I saw it properly.