The Macintosh Quadra 650, originally sold as the Macintosh Centris 650, is a

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

designed, manufactured and sold by

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

from February 1993 to September 1994. The Centris 650 was introduced alongside the smaller Centris 610 as the replacement for the

Macintosh IIci The Macintosh IIci is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from September 1989 to February 1993. It is a more powerful version of the Macintosh IIcx, released earlier that year, and shares the same compa ...

and

Quadra 700 The Macintosh Quadra 700 is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from October 1991 to March 1993. It was introduced alongside the Quadra 900 as the first computers in the Quadra series, using the Motorola 68040 ...

, and it was intended as the start of the new midrange

Centris The genus ''Centris'' contains circa 250 species of large apid bees occurring in the Neotropical and Nearctic realms, from Kansas to Argentina. Most females of these bees possess adaptations for carrying floral oils rather than (or in additi ...

line of computers. Later in 1993, Apple decided to follow an emerging industry trend of naming product families for their target customers – Quadra for business, LC for education, and Performa for home – and folded the Centris 650 into the Quadra family. The renamed Quadra 650 also received a speed bump from 25 MHz to 33 MHz for its 68040 CPU. The Quadra 650 was discontinued without a direct replacement in September 1994, although the recently introduced

Power Macintosh 7100 The Power Macintosh 7100 is a personal computer that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from March 1994 to January 1996. It is the mid-range machine of the first generation of Power Macintosh line, between the Power Macintosh ...

, which has the same IIvx desktop case as the Quadra 650, had a similar target audience and was sold in the same price range.

Models

There are two versions of the Centris 650: One with 4 MB of RAM soldered to the logic board and an FPU-less

Motorola 68LC040 The Motorola 68040 ("''sixty-eight-oh-forty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola ...

CPU, and one with 8 MB of logic board RAM, a full

Motorola 68040 The Motorola 68040 ("''sixty-eight-oh-forty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola ...

, and an onboard

AAUI Apple Attachment Unit Interface (AAUI) is a mechanical re-design by Apple of the standard Attachment Unit Interface (AUI) used to connect computer equipment to Ethernet. The AUI was popular in the era before the dominance of 10BASE-T networki ...

port for

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

. Each can be configured with an 80 MB, 230 MB, or 500 MB 3.5-inch hard drive. Standard equipment on all Centris 650 models includes onboard video (with VGA support via an adapter), 3

NuBus NuBus () is a 32-bit parallel computer bus, originally developed at MIT during between 1978 and 1979 as part of the NuMachine workstation project, it would subsequently be standardized by the IEEE in 1987. The first complete implementatio ...

slots, a

Processor Direct Slot A processor direct slot (PDS) is a slot incorporated into many older Macintosh models that allowed direct access to the signal pins of a CPU, similar to the functionality of a local bus in PCs. This would result in much higher speeds than having ...

, two ADB and two serial ports, an external SCSI connector, and a 5.25-inch drive bay. There are four SIMM slots that support 4, 8, 16, and 32 MB SIMMs, allowing for a maximum of 132 or 136 MB of RAM depending on the amount of soldered memory.

System 7.1 System 7 (later named Mac OS 7) is the seventh major release of the classic Mac OS operating system for Macintosh computers, made by Apple Computer. It was launched on May 13, 1991, to succeed System 6 with virtual memory, personal file sharin ...

was included as standard and is the minimum required version. The higher-end model also came with 1MB VRAM installed, enabling 16-bit color at 640x480 resolution. The availability of 16-bit color was significant, as it was the standard bit depth of Apple's then-new

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

video standard. Compared to the

, Quadra 900/

950 Year 950 ( CML) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Arab–Byzantine War: A Hamdanid army (30,000 men) led by Sayf al-Dawla raids into Byzantine theme Anatolia. He defea ...

and

Quadra 840AV The Macintosh Quadra 840AV is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from July 1993 to July 1994. It was introduced alongside the Centris 660AV, where "AV" signifies audiovisual capabilities, such as video input ...

, the Centris/Quadra 650 cannot be expanded to 2MB VRAM and thus does not support 24-bit color unless a 24-bit video card is installed. As a way to promote the use of

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms, such as Text (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...

, Apple also sold a Centris 650 "CD-ROM bundle", which had 8 MB of RAM and 1 MB of

video RAM Video random-access memory (VRAM) is dedicated computer memory used to store the pixels and other graphics data as a framebuffer to be rendered on a computer monitor. It often uses a different technology than other computer memory, in order to b ...

, and included a microphone, an AppleCD 300i CD-ROM drive, and a System 7 install CD. Introduced February 10, 1993: * Macintosh Centris 650: Sold in five configurations: ** 25 MHz 68LC040, 4 MB RAM (on board), 512 KB VRAM, 80 MB HDD, no Ethernet ** 25 MHz 68040, 8 MB RAM (on board), 512 KB VRAM, 80 MB HDD, Ethernet ** 25 MHz 68040, 8 MB RAM (on board), 512 KB VRAM, 230 MB HDD, Ethernet ** 25 MHz 68040, 8 MB RAM (on board), 1 MB VRAM, 230 MB HDD, Ethernet, AppleCD 300i and microphone ** 25 MHz 68040, 24 MB RAM (including 8 MB on board), 1 MB VRAM, 500 MB HDD, Ethernet Introduced October 21, 1993: * Macintosh Quadra 650: 33 MHz 68040. The Quadra 650 performed faster than the Quadra 630 and Quadra 950 but slower than the

Quadra 800 The Macintosh Quadra 800 (also sold with bundled server software as the Apple Workgroup Server 80) is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Quadra series of Macintosh computers. Introduced in February 1993 alongside the first ...

, despite all four models sharing the 33 MHz 68040. As the

Macintosh IIvx The Macintosh IIvx is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from October 1992 to October 1993. It is the last of the Macintosh II family of Macintosh computers. The IIvx was introduced at the same time as the slo ...

shares the same desktop form factor, it can be upgraded to the Centris/Quadra 650 by swapping the logic board.

Timeline

References

650 __NOTOC__ Year 650 ( DCL) was a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar. The denomination 650 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for ...

Quadra 650 Quadra 650 Quadra 650 Computer-related introductions in 1993 Products and services discontinued in 1994

Models

Timeline

References

External links