Re: AMD consistency
These things aren't put together the week before they're launched. If your suppliers don't live up to their promises, you're stuck having to bodge around things like the laptop running hotter than expected and not supporting low-power memory in large enough sizes. Apple did that like everyone else did, but I can't imagine they're happy about having to do so. Is it really that difficult to believe that they would feel burned by Intel shipping basically the same chips as they were in 2013 but at higher clock speeds with greater power consumption for so long?
I'd be very surprised in Intel's failures didn't play a major role in the 12" MacBook being ditched, because it correlates with Intel failing to deliver improvements in that power envelope.