I am not praising Apple on this situation. I think GT is the fall-guy / scapegoat here.
I think this mess all comes down to Apple deciding, late in the game, that sapphire was not a possible/practical/affordable solution for mobile device screens.
From this decision Apple then decided to cover it's ass for making an impossible/impractical/unaffordable decision in the first place.
The most powerful organizations in the world can get away with this type of stuff.
What part of "GT began missing technical milestones back in February" did you not read?
Apple never publicly declared that the iPhone 6 would have sapphire. Hell, they still haven't. They were working GT on a new, cutting edge material for their products. It's called R&D. Companies do it all the time, and we never hear about 98% of it. The reason this is such a big deal is because it's Apple, and Tim Cook can't belch after dinner without it making headline news.
GT failed to make something happen that they agreed to try. Does that alone make them the bad guy here? No. Is Apple the bad guy for deciding that they didn't want their products to be held hostage to a material that clearly wasn't ready for prime time? No.
My only issue with all of this (besides the demonization of both Apple and GT by low information posters on this site) is the troubling apparent dumping of stock by upper management of GT after it became clear to them that they were failing at their goal. Hopefully, the SEC will do a full investigation into this, and if there was wrongdoing those men will end up in jail.
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On the other hand - people want to believe that GTAT pulled one over on Apple. That pretty much implies that Apple couldn't or didn't do their due diligence. That doesn't sound like Apple.
The money Apple spent on this project is a rounding error to them. This was an R&D project that didn't work out. There are tons of these every year. It's the cost of pushing the envelope in the tech world.
The only drama here is the possibility of insider trading by upper management of GT.