once I got home and fiddled with it ... it shows
The crystal on the Chinese mega (the one thats cost me more time and money than if I bought the real thing at radio shack) is clocking in at 15.285Mhz, so its the bottom of the barrel for a 5% part, but should be close enough
The LA connected direct to the 232 converters tells me that yes the apple is "sending" 0b11001000, confirmed with my TI MAX232 and a modern device P5 232 converter (which is a hex inverter and a zener diode in a nutshell).
I cant measure the real RS232 lines cause my USB LA would explode, but after inversion what happens is the line is high, you send a byte, it twiddles bits and goes back high again after the stop bit, which is where I think its picking up the extra logic high.
Course the question still stands why a PC has zero issues with it, and how do I go about correcting it so I can get to the interesting part of the project
And thanks for your help.
PS: Ill tweak the baud rates tomorrow, but the LA is locking on to the exact baud rate and still getting an extra 1 on the left