Is it me are more than the unusual amount of people having issues these days......
No that's not it. I'm not hearing anything about repairs on Whites', Tesoros or XP Deus and very few on the Garretts. One buddy let water in his Garrett somehow so had to have it fixed....
If you are referring to Minelab products in general (the above issue is with a pinpointer, not the Equinox, FWIW - even though it was posted in this forum), that may be true because of all the new ML products that are on the street because of the unprecedented Equinox sales surge and the recent release of the new pinpointers last fall. That is a fact that I have confirmed in discussions with a few dealers. Without the actual sales numbers and failure report numbers, this, of course, can't be confirmed. But of all the products subsequently mentioned other than Garrett, there have been no new release of products and the # of AT Max's out there has been severely undercut by the Equinox release. The Makro Kruzer was released about the same time as the Equinox, but that forum has been eerily quiet lately in terms of discussion and finds.
New product releases of electronics have a failure curve, called the bathtub curve. With a high percentage of "infant mortality" failures near the beginning of life, lowering to a baseline of failure percentage for most of the product lifetime, finally with a an increase near the end of product life as thermal induced and component age related failures take over. The pace of electronic device innovation and feature release (especially in the cell phone industry) means that most products become obsolete well before they reach the end-of-life failure part of the curve. That seems to be coming true for metal detectors as well.
Smokey, I would hazard a guess, that neither you nor I would be so enamored of the Deus if we had adopted it in 2009 with its issues on coil quality and battery reliability vs. when you purchased yours in 2016 or 2017 (me in early 2015). Or like many of us Deus users waited for 2+ years for the promised Version 4 upgrade and HF coils first teased in 2015 (finally released in 2017) which came out with some minor glitches like faulty software and battery connector pin issues.
Whites - wish you have lived with me when I picked up my MX Sport and had to send it back after a month for a firmware upgrade because of a recovery speed bug and the subsequent faceplate leakage issues suffered by the product when folks started dunking theirs in the water that summer. Whites reacted swiftly, but it was nevertheless a black eye at the time. And I can say Whites faithfully took care of me right up to the end of my warranty when the battery case fasteners cracked for no apparent reason. Replacing them under warranty. No complaints other than the cost of having to ship it back to Washington.
If you want to hear about AT Max problems, hang around the AT Max forum for awhile and you will get an earful on noisy coils and strange blips and bleeps. Again, Garrett is doing the right thing and addressing the issue with replacement coils and units, but it doesn't sound like they necessarily have a handle on the problem (doesn't affect all units) and it may be a design artifact because Garrett really tried to address AT Pro depth by making the machine run on the edge ("hotter") by upping the gain. The result is more noise sensitivity and no real way (unlike what you have with the Equinox multiple Mulit IQ modes) to tame it down because you are limited by it being a single frequency machine.
Tesoros - I have not owned one, but from what I have seen they are rock solid, light, reliable machines but also kept simple and straightforward which gives them excellent performance and reliability without the risk higher end features introduce in detector designs. But then again, some of those high end features are very desirable to detectorists. It is no accident that Alain Loubet (CEO of XP) loved Tesoro detectors and actually approached the Tesoro lead designer with some "ideas" on how he could improve his machine, which basically fell on deaf ears. So he started XP on his own, and the rest is history.
For the demand and number of units out there, Equinox is holding its own. I am neither surprised nor alarmed by the number of issues reported considering this machine hit the streets in February and based on the number of units out there.
So is the amount of folks with problems "unusual", I would say the answer is probably not for Equinox based on it's recent release and popularity. We are just going to hear a lot about the issues because so many folks have them and they are new.
