@rcqldr (and others who enjoy Techno Soap Opera)
This will be a bit out of order (and probably TLDR but for the few who love the history of things) but first let me address pricing.
Price (and intro to PnP)
Were Macs (and other Apple products) commonly priced higher than PC systems? Yes. Was that OVERpricing? NO! The quality of components was commensurrate with price. The most obvious example I already noted being SCSI devices as opposed to ATA/IDE, but Apple always tried to keep prices down and even develop new hardware considerably cheaper that that which existed, but would not go below a higher threshold of quality.
Example - (from wikipedia-MacIntosh)
The Macintosh was designed to achieve adequate graphics performance, which had previously required hardware costing over US$100,000, a price inaccessible to the middle class. This narrow goal resulted in an efficient design which traded off expandability but met or exceeded the baseline performance of its competitors.[7][8]
Processor and memory
The centerpiece of the machine was a Motorola 68000 microprocessor connected to 128 KB DRAM by a 16-bit data bus. Lack of RAM proved to be a constraint to much multimedia software, and the RAM could not be upgraded. A 64 KB ROM chip boosted the effective memory to 192 KB, but this was offset by the display's 22 KB framebuffer, which was shared with the DMA video controller.
Note: There were 8 TTL chips (in addition to 4 PAL Chips and 2 more TTL Chips to control the controllers in an integrated manner) providing DMA control, but limited to Video and Audio. There just weren't many peripherals back then that needed larger scale DMA control.
Please don't forget that for several years when "Wintel" either couldn't address more than 1MB RAM at all and later more only through a tiny "window" (not to mention other barriers like segmentation ), Mac's system directly addressed 16MB and suffered far less barriers than "WIntel" did. That may sound small now, in light of multi GB systems, but it was Orders of Magnitude larger and more powerful, then. Doesn't that take higher development cost hardware (and associated software)? and wouldn't one expect that difference to come with a price difference? Certainly nobody expects to pay the same price for a 100HP Fiat as for a 1600 HP Lamborghini.
Note: The highest HP Lamborghini is actually ~700 HP, less than 0.5 of the above analogy, and costs almost $400,000 USD. A 106HP Fiat 500 is $13,000 USD. I'm not comparing the cars, just our accepted expectations of cost/benefit where we know the benefits. In the 1980s (and even later) many wondered why any individual would even want a PC, let alone be willing to pay the price of a car to own one. THIS is why Macs inherited the mistaken tag of "overpriced".
Plug 'n Play
True, later, other peripherals depended on either ADB or the add-on, or later, built-in, SCSI bus, but the affinity for busses is plusses. You may recall that although USB 1.0 was called a "serial bus" it was not a true bus in the sense that even IBMs short-lived parallel VLB bus was, but more importantly the SCSI bus, which includes processing of
Command Queuing, defined at the device level. This sort of
intelligent bus handles interrupts in a vastly superior manner.
This led to the choice for FireWire, a true bus in which devices could interact and "set themselves up" for interrupts (with fewer needed, btw, since even back then the SCSI drive controller could access multiple drives simultaneously, soon numbering 15 devices). The only reason drives that evolved from ATA/IDE now feature simultaneous access is the move to SATA and the Advanced SCSI Programming Interface (ASPI). This is also when Apple/Mac decided to embrace the cheaper drives, when they reached similar performance and reliability, and when sheer adoption rate numbers kept the price down to near PATA pricing.
Firewire was fully functional as true Plug 'n Play Bus by 1986, and very mature by 1990. Members may recall, by contrast, the Win98 TV intro in early 1998 in which a USB Scanner was plugged in Live, which promptly crashed the system.
Also, going back to 1988 with the Mac II, bus mastering expansion cards had become available. By contrast, this did not become commonly available on Intel machines until mid 1990s. Any PCI component can request control of the bus ("become the bus master") and request to read from and write to system memory. DMA is still in there for legacy, but has been obsolete a very long time.
wikipedia-DMA said:
In the original IBM PC, there was only one Intel 8237 DMA controller capable of providing four DMA channels (numbered 0–3), as part of the so-called Industry Standard Architecture, or ISA. These DMA channels performed 8-bit transfers and could only address the first megabyte of RAM. With the IBM PC/AT, a second 8237 DMA controller was added (channels 5–7; channel 4 is dedicated as a cascade channel for the first 8237 controller), and the page register was rewired to address the full 16 MB memory address space of the 80286 CPU. This second controller performed 16-bit transfers.
Having even 2 chainlinked 8237's was not only no guarantee of Plug 'n Play, it was an abject failure with legacy that plagued even early PCI devices. As a then system builder and service tech, I cannot possibly count the number of hours I spent in C:\config.sys and C:\autoexec.bat getting any ISA device and many PCI devices to resolve conflicts. Soundcards were particularly abyssmal.
The "high byte" problem mentioned was a choice at the time and was abandoned by 1989, with v7, notably with the release of the Mac IIci. I find your emphasis on DMA puzzling in light of the history of Plug 'n Play hardware, and my statement stands. Mac's PnP was superior from the very beginning until the year 2000. So maybe I was too conservative with "10 years" when 15 is closer to the mark.
IMHO, Windows 2000 was the first true 32-bit, stable (as well as pretty much fully functional PnP) OpSys by MS. In the beginning Windows was a lesser quality product with superior marketing. While there are reasons to choose or try other systems, nobody can argue that they haven't matured well. Windows has become more than just popular. It is now robust.
