Apple

Remembering My Story of Owning a Macintosh Centris 610 — 1993

Bigger, more powerful and weird in many respects. #apple #Macintosh #history #centris

JF Martin

03 May 2022 — 2 min read

The Macintosh Centris 610 came at around the same time when I completed my university years and started working at an Apple dealer as a salesperson. I bought the Mac with the Macintosh 16” Colour Display with a resolution of 832×624. It was my first Mac with a colour screen. This combination made the whole thing look like a Sun Microsystems workstation. From a design perspective, the Centris 610 had a weird look. The front panel had three sections: the leftmost sporting the Apple logo and the model label, the middle one hosting the CD-ROM drive and the rightmost the floppy drive. The proportion and alignment of the panels were uneven. You could lift open the case of the Mac with two releasing clips on the back, reminiscent of the Apple II. The power button located on the front had a convex design, short travel and felt bizarre when pressed. Even the startup sound felt bizarre. Even more troubling: the power button was so close to the floppy drive that people often thought it was for ejecting the floppy from the drive! What a design mistake. Was this thing designed outside of Apple? It wasn’t Apple at its best. Don’t miss a full tour of the Macintosh Centris 610 on YouTube.

I remember playing a specific game on this machine, it was Ambrosia Maelstrom. Believe it or not, you can still download this game and play it on your Mac today.

I remember spending quite some time on Usenet newsgroups using NewsWatcher¹. Those were popular back in the day. On one occasion, I stumbled upon an Apple engineer posting an article explaining some technical aspects of the motherboard design and the graphics subsystem capabilities. It wasn’t a common thing to read this kind of comment from an Apple employee. It gave us a rare peek at deep Macintosh internals.

The Macintosh Centris 610 had a very short stay in my life; it was a transition machine for me. I don’t remember much about it. In 1993, I was promoted to another job at the Apple dealer and was asked to take the role of pre-sales and post-sales technical support. I was enthusiastic because this granted me access to a lot of Apple hardware, software, and internal documents for Apple dealers. Then, out of nowhere, I fell in love with the PowerBook Duo 210 machine. I decided to get one, which marked the end of my Centris 610 for me.