Said it before, I'll say it again--when we look at these reports of GTA's severe production troubles with sapphire, let's not forget that prior to inking the deal with Apple they were primarily a PV silicon manufacturer, and one that had just had its entire business collapse due to the implosion of the PV market. The company was a financial mess and sales were in the toilet in 2013; this new sapphire process was their way of engineering their way out of a death spiral by switching to a new product that wasn't suffering from a flooded market.
Which is a perfectly good plan, so long as you can A) Find someone to finance the scale-up, and B) actually produce the product in question at scale.
Basically, though, this wasn't just a gamble on a huge payoff if they scaled the sapphire--the company was
already failing in 2013, so it was a gamble to save the company from potential bankruptcy.
As another poster pointed-out, it now makes sense why the contract was so strict and one-sided in Apple's favor.
That's what I was thinking--based on some of this, while GTA had plenty of experience with PV silicon, they were basically unproven at any kind of scale with sapphire, and Apple figured they'd dump a bunch of money into the process to see if it could go somewhere, with Gorilla Glass as the backup. But they certainly weren't going to pony up half a billon dollars for an unproven process without a pretty big axe hanging over GTA's head to make sure they delivered (or suffered badly if they didn't).
