But the sapphires used here wouldn't be natural sapphires - they'd be artificial sapphires which are completely transparent (unless color is intentionally added).

Hmmm... But that's the thing. They're not bluish purple. Artificial sapphires (which is what would be used here) are completely transparent unless color is desired for some reason. The color of natural sapphires comes from impurities.

Which makes one wonder if that new sapphire glass covering the iPhone 5's camera isn't at least partially to blame

It will become a mark of distinction - everyone will know your photos were taking with an iPhone 5 (like the first commenter in the article you referenced) :)

It's EXPECTED that a sapphire lens is likely to glow purple under extreme light.

a synthetic glass which mimics a sapphire's toughness and has nothing to do with colour

Hmmm, no. "Sapphire glass" is solid artificial sapphire, not a surface coating. You are correct, however, that it has no color.

Not sure of your point. It was a very real problem, though the term "death grip" was very misleading (since all it required was a single finger touching a specific point). I often had to change my grip on my iPhone 4 when browsing the web and my bars went to zero - particularly on a warm day when my hands were a bit…

It's almost certainly the sapphire component added to the lens

Despite the fact that sapphires have a purple tint, the color is almost certainly unrelated.

The use of sapphire crystal is indeed... questionable

So now we're restricting who can post/whatever based on their religious beliefs? Great. :)

Oh, I've read their blog postings on the matter. Never seen a mention of needing a separate code base for each and every release of IE, which would have been necessary if this ludicrous statement were true:

They're dropping support for IE 8 an earlier because of lack of support for standards and inconsistencies with other browsers (event model, for example). Ultimately, it is to reduce the size of the codebase - getting rid of stuff that won't be needed going forwards.

dropping IE support in jQuery 2

Well, I looked. Found ONE video about a bent iPhone 5, and it was like that out of the box rather than as a result of someone sitting on it. You have a link?

No version of IE has even been cross compatible with other versions of IE

Not sure what you mean, exactly. To clarify... jQuery 2.0 will drop support for versions of IE prior to version 9.

But not because of performance, because of the fact that it seems to refuse to render sites the same way as other browsers.

Maybe. But I have several entire countries in my GPS :)