Who cares if it's a scratch or a fracture? If you have to use exact laboratory conditions to not render the lens useless then it's a bad design -- sapphire or not.
Or, here's a crazy idea... maybe don't go jamming
extremely hard pointed objects into A CAMERA LENS. Would you stab an ice pick into your own eye? If not, then why purposely try the same sort of thing with your phone's camera lens?
Is your front door a "bad design", because it can't withstand getting hit by an armor-piercing round from the 120mm cannon of an M1 Abrams tank? Or is it sufficient for the intended purpose, because it will withstand the things expected to actually happen?
Apple has done a lot to make the cameras in their phones not get messed up. I have iPhones 4, 5, and 6, and despite roughly two years of daily pocket carry for each one, all the lenses are in pristine condition - not a hint of scratching on any of them. Apple says the lenses are sapphire, I have no reason to disbelieve them. Whatever they've done works great
under practical conditions.
When you say, "If you have to use exact laboratory conditions to not render the lens useless then it's a bad design", it's hard to tell if you just really don't understand logic or if you're purposely misunderstanding the test in order to twist things around so you can "win". I bet I can hit the lens with a sledgehammer and it'll break - does that prove anything useful? No, absolutely not (other than it's not made out of Adamantium). There are carefully specified tests for determining hardness (that's the way science works). The claim is that the procedure in the video exceeded the conditions specified by the test standards. This claim seems entirely plausible. Does this have any practical bearing in the real world? Not really. Unless you go around stabbing your camera's lens with ice picks on a regular basis.
The lens is a very small part of the phone (in terms of surface area), it needs to be very thin, and it has been engineered to survive the situations it is likely to experience in practice (here's some news: they didn't use sapphire because it's a fun word to say, they used it in order to meet their goals for optical clarity and survivability). The watch crystal, on the other hand, is orders of magnitude larger, covers basically the entire front of the watch's mechanism, is much more exposed, expected to be mounted on your wrist most of the time, where it will often get bumped into all sorts of things - so it is, and needs to be, a
lot thicker than the camera lens. Given this, the suggestion that the iPhone's lens fractured from too much pressure, rather than scratching (while the watch crystal survived the same pressure), is plausible. And, while interesting, the fact that it is possible to break the tiny camera lens by jamming hard pointy things into it is hardly surprising or a cause for concern.
