AGP was an Intel invention, who do you think would get it first. AGP is also not a standard, but done the typical PC way. Look at how many times it has been updated. Obviously very little thought was put into it and requires recurring modification. Much like the ATA/IDE standard. Look at ho many times the ceiling was reached, while the SCSI side was just laughing at them.
PCI: most companies used their own bus designs. The PC used ISA, Sun used sBus and UPA, IBM had theirs, etc. PCI is where all companies decided to use a common bus. Wait until 3GIO, it will blow the doors off PCI and PCI-X. There still are specialized buses, like AGP and UPA still in use.
64-bit processors in a peecee? Get real; Sun has had 64-bit processors for sometime now. So has IBM, Digital (DEC), HP, SGI, etc. The first "peecee" with a 64-bit processor would be the Itanium, that is even a stretch as it is a replacement for the PA-RISC and was considered a workstation as was the ones from Sun. IBM, SGI, etc.. The 64-Bit AMD will really be the first PC. I wouldn't exactly say they have beat Apple by all that much. How many big peecee makers do you see selling a 64-bit AMD right now, today?
The peecee side will get desktop chip from AMD while Apple will join the exclusive list and give their customers scaled down server chip. Guess which one has better engineering?
Networking all dealt with what the companies that were buying a large amount of systems wanted. The peecee side has an advantage there. Apple has more machines in their lineup with gigabit then the peecee side does. They are still using 10/100, like the Dell workstations.
Digital audio has been slow to adopt all around.
Graphics cards. Blame Nvidia and ATI for that. They sell to the peecee side first. If they released them at the same time, then neither would have an advantage. There are more peecee users then Max users. This has nothing to so with this argument. Just like if Apple had over 50% of the market share, ATI and Nvidia would cater to the Mac crowd first. To really get technical, consumers don't get the high-end graphic cards. Professionals get them in terms of Sun, SGI, etc visualization workstations for CAD, animations, graphics, etc.
Do you know why PCI-X was created? 3GIO was not close enough, so it is a band-aid until it does come in the next year. That is all PCI-X is. It is irrelevant. I would rather have independent 64-bit 66Mhz buses. Have four slots, have four independent buses. That offers you 528MB/s on each one.
Some companies have been put off by what memory to use, you had DDR and RAMBUS. No one knew which way to go. At times too much emphasis is put on the memory speed. There is more to making a fast system then just memory speed.
Serial-ATA has been slow to adopt, period. Dell still is selling ATA systems and use SCSI in some of their workstations. Some of their machines have S-ATA though.
All variations of USB was and never will be a standard. There are compatibility issues with it and it controlled by the peecee industry. No wonder why they had it first. Firewire was started before USB ever was. USB was only deemed necessary because they didn't want to pay Apple royalties, so they invented their own so they can pay themselves to use it. It is a way for the executives to make more money, look at who is on the board. If you look at the licensing costs, it costs an extra dollar to have two Firewire ports instead of USB.
http://www.usb.org/info
Why didnt they take Firewire to the IEEE like Apple did? It would have delayed it by a year or two, by then Firewire would have had a firm footing and USB would be DOA.
Apple has more super dives in their machines then their competition does.
Hmm, Centrino wasn't the first; Apple was, several years ago. Centrino also doesn't support G, which will come late this or next year. If you want G, you have to have a card that will take up a PC Card slot or a PCI slot in the machine. Apple will install one from the factory and not take-up a slot.
You forgot one. The peecee was the first to have integrated graphics built-in to the chipset. They can keep it, as they are usually very lousy.
Guess what, AGP will fade away as well. 3GIO will take care of it. It will offer more bandwidth in a switch environment. If you want to get technical, AGP 8 was the first to offer dual display capabilities. Companies like Sun have had that for years, either through the UPA, sBus or PCI.