Someone said iPhone 7's Sapphire Glass wasn't, but it is

A video published this week showed an iPhone 7 with what appeared to be a scratched lens cover glass. This would be astounding, given the idea that Apple did indeed make this lens cover glass with Sapphire, a material that should only be able to be scratched with a diamond. In reality, the lens cover glass (which is indeed made of Sapphire) was not scratched, but fractured. Fracturing a piece of Sapphire glass at this size is possible, and easy, if one uses the right tools. In the real world, though, it's nearly impossible.

It's difficult to believe that such nitpicky bits of test are being done on the tiniest of components in smartphones in 2016, but here we are. The lens cover glass for the iPhone 7 – and the top of the Home Button up front (above the Touch ID sensor) are both Sapphire.

Apple said so when they revealed the device in the first place, and Phil Schiller confirmed it once more on Twitter this week.

When a laboratory-precision tools are used to test a device without a lab-controlled environment, all tests are invalid. If anyone is able to scratch Sapphire Glass with a tool that should be softer than Sapphire Glass, something is wrong.

In this case, fracturing has occurred. Pressure from a hard object – a hardness tool for testing materials such as this – can exert massive amounts of pressure with very little effort. A tiny child could break the glass over the iPhone 7's back-facing camera lens if they had the right tool.

In the real world, it's extremely difficult to scratch Sapphire Glass – nearly impossible if the user isn't dropping the device onto hard objects and scraping it up on purpose. If someone wanted to scratch the lens – or break it – there's really nothing stopping them.