Obvious Beta: Difference between revisions
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* Early adopters of the [[Xbox 360]] found themselves acting as beta testers for the machine's cooling system. Then as beta testers for the various fixes for this. Depending on who you believe and which motherboard variants you include the failure rate within 3 years was anywhere between 30 and 70% with many customers requiring multiple replacements. Arguably these issues were only finally fixed (although die shrinks and the ability to install disc images - avoiding the extra heat, wear and noise from the 12x DVD drive spinning constantly at full speed - helped they couldn't solve the fundamentally flawed cooling model of pushing hot air out a rear panel which the air vents had to share with various AV connectors) with the release of the slim redesign ''5 years'' after the original launch.
* Clive Sinclair, head of Sinclair Radionics and later of Sinclair Research, which brought the [[ZX Spectrum]] to Britain and helped kickstart its home computer market, valued [[Minimalism|minimalist]] designs that the British public could afford, at the cost of neglecting to have his creations properly tested and polished. By far the most infamous example is the [http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm Sinclair Black Watch], an early digital watch that used an LED and sold for either £17.95 or £24.95 depending on whether you got it in a do-it-yourself kit (like most home electronics of the time) or preassembled. The kit was notoriously difficult to assemble; it had a battery life of only ten days (resulting in many preassembled watches arriving already dead) and its batteries were just as difficult to replace; its integrated chip [[Weaksauce Weakness|could be destroyed by static from nylon clothing]]; and most damning of all, it was unreliable in keeping time because [[Epic Fail|it ran at different speeds depending on the weather]]. Oh, and just for kicks, it could ''[[Explosive Instrumentation|explode]]'' if you left it powered on for too long. The product was such a gigantic flop that Sinclair Radionics would've gone bankrupt if the British government hadn't stepped in to provide subsidies.
** Sinclair's attempts at transport generally fell into this. The 1992 "Zike" was one of the earliest commercial electric bicycles, and was clearly ''too'' early with poor battery and motor, not helped by being a pretty bad bike in its own right. The later, non-motored, A-bike needed to be followed by two product revisions to address serious safety issues.
== In-Fiction Examples ==
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