And here is something to read in the remaining hours: "As Apple (AAPL) 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 (HPQ). (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.”" Bloomberg BusinessWeek