Huh? How was it "way late?". Apple introduced GigE in the July 2000 revision of the Power Mac G4, and I'm pretty sure it was one of the first "consumer/prosumer grade" machines on the market to include it. GigE wasn't really mainstream until at least three or so years later. (Trust me, I've been in charge of buying a *lot* of networking gear over the years.)
What is your support for this other than the fact that you like slots, MOAR the better, and you're projecting that prejudice backwards into the heads of the majority of the computer buying public at large? I've ripped into a lot of computers over the years, and frankly the most common thing I find in expansion slots are cobwebs. The number of slots in a machine was, outside of people that had very specific needs in mind, *never* that much of a consideration, and it's also extremely dirty pool the way you keep handwaving the fact that a lot of the ***t that had to go in an expansion slot on a white box PC was already soldered to the motherboard of even the most basic Macs. An 8 slot PC isn't 8 slots, it's six at best, and realistically it's more like four once you add the connectivity that a base Mac comes with. (Three slots if the Mac has Ethernet onboard... heck, you can actually sort of give that to the Mac even without ethernet because all Macs had Localtalk, which is a perfectly serviceable network technology for small/simple deployments and a heck of a lot better than what a PC came with, which was *ZIPPO*.) You're also utterly ignoring the fact that quite a lot of the more premium-brand business PCs that more closely competed with Apple's products in terms of style *also* had fewer slots. For instance, Dell sold a line of cute little 486 machines in their "486P" line that only had three miserable ISA slots (which meant your options were *really bad* if you ever wanted to upgrade the video card), and they must have sold a bazillion of those things because they were dirt common on secretary's desks all through the 1990's. Again, if you're keeping score: add a Soundblaster card and a network card to one of those to match a Quadra 700 you're down to *one* ISA vs. two Nubus. Pretty sure the Mac wins that one!
Seriously? The ASC sound chip used in the Mac II family machines is essentially feature-comparable to a Soundblaster Pro (22mhz PCM with stereo out), and the Quadras up that to CD-quality. The *one* thing they're missing compared to a soundblaster card is the OPL synth chip for plinky chiptune goodness (Apple couldn't include a hardware synth thanks to their ridiculous legal settlement with the Beatles' record label), but you *could* easily attach a MIDI device like a Roland MPU box using the built-in serial ports. Basically *nobody* cared about the difference in specs between the two options, all they knew is that either was *infinitely* better than what you got out of a basic PC speaker... which is why, sure, back in the 386/486 era the *one* most common user-added card you're likely to find in a PC is a sound card. (And you can bet your sweet patootie that the person who installed it *absolutely hated* doing it. ISA sound cards are the *worst*, especially 16 bit ones like the PAS16.) Did anyone other than people *specifically* trying to do production work with sound *ever* buy a sound card for a Mac? Sure, I know they existed, but did any games take advantage of them in any form? Citation needed; without such I'm inclined to say that most people found the Mac's built-in hardware "good enough".
Fair enough, though I've been talking about perceived value. This isn't the place for it, but I've held onto the pages from the most even handed review I saw from 1984 comparing the 128K to the PC. It details the Mac's inclusion of the several slots needed to match what was included in the Steve's vision of computer as standalone appliance (more on that below) including out of the box networking capability.
Yes, seriously. Granted, ASC was capable and even implemented with stereo output on the jack in the back on higher end models. The problem was that Apple tied the two channels together on any Mac that had a chance to compete with the $3,000 Dell you mentioned. Limiting the LC, LCII, LCIII and CC to mono output was a big mistake IMO as that was the period in which the PC became the platform of choice for gaming. That was a bmajor factor after the release of Windows 3.0 which included Sound Blaster drivers.
OK, that absurd lawsuit over right of use for a name from a different industy could explain a bit of the Mac didn''t have stereo output for so long. But Apple tied the ASC's channels together for the Duos right through the 2300c, did they do the same for the rest of the PowerBook line? Carrying headphones with a PowerBook for a little gaming in stereo on the road would have been a nice feature in the wonderful, dockable ultraportables, but even the dock was mono at the jack back on the ranch.
Here's where the PC became more akin to the SJ's vision of computer as appliance. The Tandy 1000SX semi-compatible I bought when the Mac was the cute little hobbit lookin' thing needed the serial port card I bought with it. I kicked myself up and down the block for not buying generic because the funky printer port implementation killed off any chance of running dongled CAD/CAM apps. The dang thing just wouldn't die, it became the heart of the telecom setup because its limited number of slots and second FDD bay made it an all in one box appliance solution for internal card based HDD upgrade and the FAX modem (early 1988 when such external boxes were yet to appear for the Mac) that turned customer's FAX machines into remote scanners and my paperless office setup.
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The original Sound Blaster was also a mono device. The SoundBlaster Pro, circa mid 1991, rectified that, sort of (as NJRoadfan points out) but low-end mono 8-bit Soundblasters (and compatibles) were present on the market for a *long* time even after the Soundblaster 16 was introduced in 1992. So, again, if you're comparing "Apples" to Apples, IE, low-end machines, you're once again pretty much breaking even feature-wise when you compare an LC-series Mac to a low-end "cheap and cheerful" gaming PC.
Let's think yet a little more about "value". There's no way an LC could be considered a competitor to that $3000 Dell; I picked that machine as an example because at the time it was a premium, stylish, small-footprint "Executive Workstation", IE, I tried to find something that you'd actually reasonably cross-shop against a Quadra 700. A Dell 486P/33 would *easily* run rings around an LC II, it's not even close. (16mhz 68030 *on a 16 bit bus* vs. 33mhz 486.) Let's figure out what a potential LC buyer in January 1992 would actually be cross-shopping against. (Picking that because I have the handy list of "street prices" from omidimo above.) I'll choose the base-most 2/40mb config at $1595 and add an Apple 13" monitor at $665, for a total entry price of $2260, and to whatever PC I pick out I'll add the price of a soundblaster card (Found an ad selling it $169, so that's our reference there.). I'll break this into two categories: PCs you could buy for the same *price*, and a PC that's actually roughly comparable in terms of features, and I'll also break it down into "brand name" verses "randomly chosen from one of those sketchy ads in the back".
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That's certainly a good point. Unless there's something in the PDS arbitration circuitry that would prevent it (and it doesn't look like there's a whole lot to that) you could probably supply a gig of ram RAM effectively as fast as the SRAM used in 1992-era CPU caches.
Any mention of "Hi Def" audio gets me in the mood to snatch tinfoil hat wearers baldheaded. I can *kind* of grant that capturing at higher sample rates/bit depths might have some value in the production studio, but unless you're a vampire bat CD-quality (44.1khz@16 bit) is all the consumer will ever need. Although you do have me intrigued: who was doing "HiFi Def" audio cards in 1994? Audio cards started supporting 48k around the mid-90's because it was used for DAT and DVD soundtracks, but I don't recall seeing "Hi Def" 96k/24bit in "mainstream" consumer cards before the early 2000's. (Soundblaster Audigy 2? Of course, by this point most people had given up on discrete sound cards and were settling for AC'97 DACs built into their motherboards.)
I can tell you from owning one (a PAS 16 was my first sound card) that a PC PAS 16 was feature-wise basically a match for the Soundblaster 16. (IE, up-to-CD-quality 16bit stereo DAC plus a Yamaha OPL-3 synth chip.) Looking in the Mac PAS 16 manual it appears it's essentially identical, including exactly the same synth chip. So think of it as a Mac version of a Soundblaster 16, just without the game software support. It apparently came with a cute little mixing-board thing that the PC version didn't come with so it looks like it was trying to stake out some low-rent "prosumer audio production" niche. (Which is sort of at odds with its inclusion of a game port.) Kind of reads like a solution in search of a problem.
Same hardware can blast almost four times the data through the Ethernet port under Unix than it can under regular System 7.
CPU cache? I kind of doubt 256k of L2 cache is going to make that much difference in I/O bound processes. The faster SCSI ports on said card might certainly help overall but again, unless Apple was using *really* lousy hard drives in the Quadra 950 doing 1MB/second shouldn't be out of reach of the built-in SCSI chip.
