Sony PlayStation 4 Problems Could Be Due to Sabotage by Foxconn Student Interns
posted Thursday Nov 21, 2013 by Nicholas DiMeo
All of Sony's problems with the PlayStation 4 that I reported on last week might stem from one place: Foxconn. It would appear that the Chinese university students who were interning at the production facility and being subjected to extremely rough working conditions have fired back at the company. It's being rumored that these kids were responsible for hardware sabotage at Foxconn, including the PS4s and other high-end tech products.
A forum thread showed up with a person saying he was one of the students. The post has since been deleted but read,
Since Foxconn are not treating us well, we will not treat PS4 console well. The ps4 console we assemble can be turned on at best.
Judging from the problems we are seeing so far, that appears to be par for the course for some of the PS4s in the wild. 4Chan users have obviously been discussing these failures in the hardware since even before launch of the console, and have been heavily discussing the alleged sabotage as well.
A chinese guy posted on here like 2 weeks ago in really fractured english or translation, I can't remember and even had an image. He mentioned "PheonixStation 4" and that they have put a trace amount of lead in a good majority of the thermal paste used in the PS4 batches. He said this will mean heat won't dissapate quick enough for standby mode when the fans are programmed to a low RPM, and this will degrade the life of the CPU/GPU dramatically and also raise temps during operating by a few degrees more than normal.
Of course, you have to take everything on 4Chan with a grain of salt, however, someone later in the thread followed up by verifying the contents of the images posted.
...indeed there was a diagram with a clear mention of lead + thermal grease, which is obviously a bad (expletive) thing. Ideally, a genius thing, as the problem won't arise in QA shotgun tests of consoles as they're built, as the individual systems would need to be tested for more than an hour to really notice a difference in temps.
And, if you wanted proof in the pudding, a review by YouTuber Rick the Electronic Guy showed that the thermal paste was in pretty bad shape.
All right guys, to be frank, I was very disappointed with the thermal paste. The thermal paste was already a little hard and that's not good. That just means we're going to have problems right off the bat. So I'm actually very happy that I took mine apart...I knew Sony was going to go cheap on the thermal paste it was already hard on the inside, now there (sic) already having gpu issues on day one.
Other sources have also reported that students have sabotaged iPads, Macbooks and other Apple products as well, but those threads have since been deleted. All of this does seem to coincide with the many issues the PS4 is having already, and, the user has since updated the situation with a second thread on the matter that hasn't been deleted. You can check that out in the source link below. What do you think of all this? Can this be the thing that changes the economic future for China, now that so many problems with Foxconn have come down to true sabotage in American-purchased products? Sound off in the comments section below.
