“As Apple prepares to unveil the iPhone 6 on Sept. 9, engineers are toiling in secrecy to make sure everything works properly. Their task won’t end when the phone goes on sale,” Adam Satariano reports for Businessweek. “As customers line up to buy the device around the world, Apple employees will show up at work to learn how they screwed up—and fix it.”
“Within hours of a new phone’s release, couriers start bringing defective returns from Apple’s retail stores to the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. In a testing room, the same engineers who built the iPhone try to figure out the problem, say former employees who have participated in the program and don’t want to anger their former employer,” Satariano reports. “‘They take them apart to diagnose what’s happening right then and there,’ says Mark Wilhelm, who helped lead Apple’s returns program.”
Satariano reports, “The program, created in the late 1990s, is called early field failure analysis, or EFFA, and it’s about as fun as it sounds.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Word.
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Apple will have to do this because the news media, tech pundits and Apple-hating community are going to be looking for anything to convince the world Apple has failed in some form or fashion. So, Apple better right whatever hardware or software wrongs ASAP or preferably yesterday. Touch ID better work correctly at least 99.8% of the time or else the cockroaches will be crawling out from every crack to announce Tim Cook’s anticipated failure to become the second coming of Steve Jobs.
Wow. So Apple has a plan for returns. Who would of thunk it. Another piece of incredible detective work. I hope you get a special invite from Apple for Tuesday’s event for this piece of work. 😉
EFFA’n good.