The new xbox 360 can’t red ring because they removed the red lights.
That’s funny.
The RRoD means “internal failure,” it’s a generic error code that could mean anything. In practice, the most common failure by a long way occurs due to a component coming adrift due to heat.
Whist it’s true that the three year warranty is “only” for the RRoD, it’s a little disingenuous to imply that “everything else” is one year. There aren’t many other things that could fail on it which wouldn’t cause a RRoD.
The newer ‘big box’ models are less prone to failures that the old ones, but it does still happen. My Elite went pop after two years, and it went to Microsoft Germany and back in about ten days.
The newest ‘slim’ models don’t suffer from the same overheating problem that dogged the early ones, but as I said earlier they can still fail just like anything else can. An internal failure on these models doesn’t report as a RRoD, because as Tony says the LEDs are different. IIRC, they use a single red LED to report a fault.