But they can't do that, the scale of the product being shipped means that the potential for a complaint is high. They always knew they were shipping 10,000 in the first batch, so to say "we were going to do it later when it's cased" is just either stupid or nieve and stupid.

If they're shipping to end customers without a case, then that's the configuration that should have been tested. It's even likely that they wouldn't have to do a full set of tests on the boxed version later if the unboxed version passed ok.

I just don't get their statement, "we intended to defer". Great, you also intended to ship product in the real world. For a bunch of engineers, they sure seem dumb.

As Hugo says, they're learning the hard way on how to manufacture electronics - or at least making stupid mistakes and doing it the hard way.