[b] 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. 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.
“They take them apart to diagnose what’s happening
right then and there,” says Mark Wilhelm, who
helped lead Apple’s returns program.
The program, created in the late 1990s, is called
early field failure analysis, or EFFA, and it’s about as
fun as it sounds. The idea is to keep easily resolved
problems from becoming punch lines for late-night
comics. Often, they jury-rig a hardware fix, then
coordinate a solution across Apple’s global supply
chain. Sometimes the problems can’t be solved
quickly—remember Apple Maps leading people
astray. “Every day they don’t recognize a problem,
they are potentially manufacturing more bad
products,” says Michael Fawkes, the former head of
supply chain for Hewlett-Packard . (In his HP job he
hired Tara Bunch, now Apple’s vice president for
operations and the head of its returns program.)
“When you mess it up, you pay an enormous price.
You piss off customers, and then you have the
economics of reworking your supply chain.”
“If you can find a problem in the first week or less,
that can ultimately save millions of dollars”
All consumer-electronics companies try to keep an
eye on complaints during their product launches to
head off major problems early, but the sheer number
of Apple devices produced around the clock in
Chinese factories makes even small tweaks a
massive enterprise. Apple’s advantage is its retail
stores, Fawkes says: HP and Dell would have to
coordinate similar operations with retailers such as
Best Buy, but first responders in Cupertino learn
directly of a defective iPhone in New York, Paris, or
Tokyo as soon as a Genius Bar staffer reports it.
The phone goes on the next FedEx plane to
California. Using the serial numbers in each device,
Apple can trace a problem down to individual
workers on an assembly line.
That paid off with the original iPhone in 2007, when
many were quickly returned with faulty
touchscreens, according to an engineer involved in
fixing them. Some suppliers manufactured iPhones
with a flaw near the earpiece that let sweat from a
person’s face seep in, shorting the screen. The
EFFA team added a new coating to shield the leaky
area and told their suppliers to do the same on their
assembly lines. Other EFFA workers, investigating
the failure of early iPhone speakers, concluded that
the problem was a lack of airflow that caused the
speakers to build up pressure and implode during
flights from Chinese factories to the U.S. The team
relieved the pressure by poking holes in the
speakers. Apple declined to comment.
Apple’s EFFA testing is most stringent during a
device’s first weeks on sale, but it continues for
months as problems arise, say three former
employees involved. Along with quality-control and
operations teams, the program is run by AppleCare,
which most customers know only as the warranty
and support service pitched by Apple store clerks.
Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook used to supervise
AppleCare when he headed the operations division
and increased its standing within the company, says
Wilhelm, who now runs customer support for cloud-
storage startup Lyve Minds in Cupertino.
AppleCare representatives are in charge of providing
data to Apple’s senior executives and engineers
about defective devices and publish a weekly report
highlighting the three most common problems
reported by customers, the former employees say.
They sit in on early design meetings and can
marshal engineers from other product teams to fix
problems. As with the early iPhone bugs, most of the
problems they’ve discovered over the years relate
to components not being connected properly,
Wilhelm says—an unfastened cable or too little glue
or solder. “If you can find a problem in the first
week or less,” he says, “that can ultimately save
millions of dollars.”[/b]

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