If we filter just all numbers form the Chinese factory, we get this: This looks a lot better! But there are several things interleaved in this chart – because the serial numbers are of course counted independently in every factory. The first digit seems to be the number of the assembly line in the factory! So let’s look at the remaining 6 digits again: Let’s look at distribution of the first digit: But all numbers are > 1,000,000, which implies that the first digit has a special meaning and is not part of the number.

This gives us an idea when production was ramped up (in 20 in November, and in 2003 in August, September and October), but the statistics don’t give us absolute numbers, and they are biased towards older devices (newer devices are not entered yet, and visitors of our site tend to be early adopters).īut what about these first seven digits of the serial number? Shouldn’t these be actual “serial” numbers? Let’s look at all devices from August 2003 and sort the first seven digits by manufacturing date:

A first approximation is to look at the manufacturing dates of all Xboxes in our database. Now we want to find out how many devices were manufactured. The three digits before (“209” in my example) are the one-digit year (“2” for “2002”) and the two-digit calender week (“09” for around the first week of March). The serial sticker on an Xbox looks like this:Īfter looking at several serial numbers, it was already clear that the last two digits (“03” in my example) are the location of manufacture: 02 is Mexico, 03 is Hungary, 05 is China and 06 is Taiwan. The original idea was to find a rule to deduce the hard disk and DVD drive types in an Xbox by only looking at the serial number, which was visible through the unopened packaging. This article describes the generic approach, shows some results, and provides previously unreleased raw data of 14,000 Xbox serials so you can do your own statistics!īetween October 2003 and January 2005, the Xbox Linux Project asked all visitors to their website to enter their Xbox serial numbers, date and country of manufacture, ROM version, hard disk and DVD drive brand and other properties, and gathered more than 14,000 entries. In 2010, a German hacker is doing the exact same thing with Xboxes. Slashdot had a story recently on how in 1942, the allies were able to estimate the number of German taks produced based on the serial numbers of the tanks.

Xbox 360 serial number location