What is the most recent DVR year of manufacture anyone has? anything more recent than 2015?

uverse is a dead horse and no longer manufacturing new units they are refurbishing any replacement equipment  and are hoping to phase it out altogether, already they are not allowing new customers or installs, the only customers are grandfathered accounts which will slowly dwindle and uverse will become extinct 

@Constructive While that is all 100% true that doesn't answer my question.

Uverse is still my best option at this point(although if they can't fix my issues I'll be forced to take a different option)

Att tv/directtv stream is a garbage product for many reason,, I've used it.

A directtv satellite dish is going to have outages due to hurricanes and frequent thunderstorms in my area.

Comcast is probably 2nd best option but I'd lose a couple channels I watch and pay significantly more for internet and tv.  

So I ask again for current uverse tv customers what year did att stop buying new dvrs? Or does anyone have a refurbished one that actually has had its hard drive replaced?  (You can see date code and/or manufacture date of hard drive by flipping dvr over and using a flashlight.   

2015 i believe is the newest  

All boxes sent back should be refurbished. To what extend depends on the condition of the box. Their criteria and yours may not agree, and I would expect that has come down as U-Verse is a legacy service being phased out.

With the declining use of the service (which is no longer offered to new customers), I wonder what the rules are (and the ease of doing so) regarding customers interested in replacing the hard drive themselves. It is not something I suggest as normally a violation of Terms of Service, but am curious if there are any changes or other suggestions in that situation.

But yes it appears that 2015 is the best you can hope for. Though the hard drive might not be the original the box had if they had spare drives in stock that were made at the same time which might not have been in a previous box. Unfortunately no way to pick and choose as it is next available.

I mean expected 10+ year old hard drives is just wishful thinking /cheapness on att part. Nobody makes 10 year hard drive warranties for a reason. 5 years should be the maximum for sending a harddrive back out.  I mean last time I have in and took a 2014 but it only lasted 2 years and then I lose basically a years worth of TV.  And its like oh great I paid for nothing.  

Is that unreasonable as a customer to expect not to have equipment sent out that is for sure going to fail 90% of the time?

I mean they hard drives themselves didn't need to be purchased at the same time they are just generic dvr drives.  For instance in my isb7500 it's a 500gb Seagate pipeline 2 (the lower memory buffer version of course because att only buys the cheapest lowest bidder parts).  Which is also why the boxes use insane amounts of powe (20-30watts? Vs. A fire tv that can perform everything better for under 5 watts?  

Comes down to what is most economical for the business, even if not as much for the customer (longevity, power usage, etc.). But at this point is like requesting better quality parts be made for a VCR or 8-track. U-Verse is a technology they are moving away from, so they are understandably not dumping additional money and resources into a service no longer offered, only keeping the minimum to let it run until all customers move of their own accord or they shut down service entirely one day.

The problem is uverse is still more advanced in almost all areas (other than cloud dvr) than att tv/direct tv stream.  My list of reasons for hating it is long...:it's a clunky interface, it changes channels/streams, extremely slow, it doesn't allow you to manually adjust or even check on series recordings so often it misses episodes and doesn't record correctly, you can't add time to recordings,  you get fricken ads while paused,  it doesn't have all my local channels, it has that ridiculous 90 day/30 episode limit on recordings, etc...

I guess maybe directtv  is the premium product at this point, but I'm still not 100% convinced a satellite can deal with storms in Florida.

Comcast is probably a better option at this point than uverse, but it's definitely more expensive, especially when you have 4 tvs and if you want a decent amount of either cloud and/or local dvr storage, and internet will also cost me more since the minimum I could get on comcast is 400mbps plan just to get a measly 10mbps upload speed to match my 50/10mbps att speeds. 

If/when storms do affect service (it is satellite so just nature of the technology), you have what is recorded on your DirecTV HDDVR as well as On Demand if you are internet connected. Though the On Demand could use some improvements as doesn't adjust on the fly to accommodate fluctuating bandwidth like dedicated streaming providers.

I would check with any friends, family, or even friendly neighbors in your direct area that have DirecTV to see what their experience is regarding storms. That would get you a decent idea of what you would be looking at regarding how much the service may be affected on average.

If you do decide to get another provider, be it DirecTV or someone else, make sure to read the order confirmation thoroughly. All companies deal with agents who either say anything to make a sale or leave out (or skim over) details that might make you decide against getting them. Just a caution.

@my thoughts That's a pretty thorough model list.  I've had almost every piece of equipment on that list at one time or another.  

I refuse to accept any gray boxes, it's ridiculous that those things are still in circulation, but they definitely are.  They don't even have enough ram to properly run the current u-verse OS, so they hang constantly, check the system info and you'll see it's always at 99% used.

You are only missing the cisco isb7500 dvr, which is what I have now.  The pace iph8005 is definitely superior to it, in heat and noise.  (if I had known how bad the replacements were going to be I would have kept my brand new iph8005 when its hard drive wore out and tried replacing the drive myself, especially since it's basically user replaceable anyways.  

I have a isb7000 in 1 room, it took forever to get it replaced with anything other than a gray box.  What's annoying is at one point before stupid wireless boxes I had 3 of them and had to return them for the wireless boxes, when the system update suddenly decided that coax no longer worked at my house lol.  

Every tech who sees the isb7000 is like, yea I've never seen one.  

I've never had the motorola  2262 or 2250 because for a long time my area was cisco only, before they started mixing.  How do they compare to the others?

I've never understood the difference between the iph8010 and iph8110.  But there must be some small difference.  Since I can't get fiber I'll probably never find out.

I wonder if I complained long enough and/or bribed the tech enough if they could get me one lol.  

It makes sense that the gateways would still be new, since they are still selling internet plans, and I doubt the gateways can be refurbished all that much once they break, since they are basically just 1 board.  Although were you sure it was actually manufactured that date? or was it refurbished and slapped with a new sticker? They love to slap new "manufactured" dates on the boxes before they ship equipment.  

lol At one point I could not figure out for the life of me why I had some weird extra device (3 wireless stbs)on my network connecting through the wireless stb AP.  And finally figured out that one of my wireless stb's for some odd reason reports 2 mac addresses/IP, the original one that's labeled on the outside of the box and a different one that matches the system info for the actual network card that att must have refurbished into it.  

@Juniper Yea I was very close to switching to directtv years ago at Costco when the rep was offering me an insane deal with all the equipment for 4 tvs free and all the activation fees and monthly receiver fees waived and everything....but I said I'd think about it and drove to the Directtv store and they told me there was zero chance they'd honor any of that, and that in reality my price would end up almost double.  I knew it was sketch, when I tried to take a picture of the term sheet the rep at costco showed me and he claimed it was proprietary and I couldn't photograph it lol.  

So on direcctv the DVR works even if the satellite is down?  because uverse sure doesn't let you watch a second of anything if the connection is down lol.  

Costco, Sam's Club, etc. are 3rd party retailers (most commonly Smart Circle). They are the most well known for new customer issues. DirecTV has no stores of their own, even AT&T since the acquisition is similar to 3rd party as not well trained on DirecTV plus only deal with it through placing new customer order. So whatever "DirecTV store" you went to certainly wasn't DirecTV itself.

If satellite is out, then the DVR still functions while it is still authorized. Don't try rebooting a DVR during a storm otherwise it cannot reacquire the authorizations from the satellite. There just is no guaranteed time on how long the authorizations last until it has to automatically check again.

Just a note: There is only 1 'T' in the brand. It is DirecTV. Something to be cautious of as a lot of scams out there will add the 2nd T to fool people into thinking they are legit.

When I was an installer Cisco were they only boxes in my area. When I went on loan to another area they were Motorola. I was pleasantly surprised at how fast Motorola provisioned and how fast they went through the setup and menus. A 4 box install with Motorola saved me almost an hour on each install

By directv store I meant an att corporate store that sold directv.  Lol the second T gets added by autocorrect most the time.  And don't get me started on having to use a & for at&t everytime, such a pain.  

Hmm interesting about Motorola the only Motorola I've had is some vip2500 wireless boxes and they seemed fine.  I only ran into issues when one of the vip2500 died and my ven 401 got replaced with a 2500 and 1 Cisco wireless box and the system did not work with that combination.  A ven 501 and moving the wap an absurd amount closer finally solved that problem. 

With having lost millions of uverse tv customers you would think the warehouses would be packed full of decent refurbs at this point.  But maybe nobody ever bothered to sort the good equipment from the bad equipment.   

Some things have never made any sense to me about uverse system.  Like why can att overnight a box but sometimes it takes 3 days before the activation window opens to be allowed to activate it.  Isn't it literally just typing a serial number into the account? 

We are here to help get your DVR back up and running, @madmax988.

Thank you to all the aces for the useful information.

Just to clarify, Can you let us know what is exactly going on with your DVR?

Why do you need the replacement?

Let us know more information so that we can better assist you.

Marc, AT&T Community Specialist