[HN Gopher] The Sad Story of the Centris
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       The Sad Story of the Centris
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 19 points
       Date   : 2021-03-06 09:26 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (512pixels.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (512pixels.net)
        
       | kabdib wrote:
       | "Confusion hath made his masterpiece"
       | 
       | I was working at Apple in 1993. My parents called me one day and
       | said that they wanted to buy another Mac, and were wondering
       | which model was best for them. I'd been heads down on Newton for
       | a couple of years and hadn't paid much attention to what was
       | going on in the Mac line. So I found a catalog and started going
       | through it, expecting to give them an answer right on the phone.
       | 
       | Man, I couldn't figure it out. There seemed to be about 40
       | different models of Macintosh, some clearly high end and others
       | clearly low end, but nothing else that really stood out as very
       | much different from the rest. The names were not very helpful (is
       | a Quadra better than a Performa? What about the LC? Gahhh).
       | 
       | I would up giving them my Mac IIci (probably the best 68K-based
       | Mac ever made) and I bought a PC.
        
         | analog31 wrote:
         | It was easy for me. I bought the cheapest. I had just finished
         | grad school in 1993, and had landed in a new town with a new
         | job. Though I had run my thesis project on MS-DOS, a buddy had
         | shown me his Mac, and I liked it. The Quadra 605 was under
         | $1000, and there was an article floating around on how to
         | jailbreak the video port so you could use a non-Apple display.
         | 
         | It was a clean machine. The tiny case sat under the monitor
         | (old CRT's needed to be boosted to eye level anyway). It popped
         | open with no screws, and the whole thing was a single board
         | with a 30-Watt power supply.
         | 
         | The Centris line were a bit bigger, but not really any more
         | complex -- just space for more add-ons.
        
           | fredoralive wrote:
           | Jailbreak seems to imply DRM or something, it's just Mac
           | video used a different connector to VGA. It's still just
           | analogue video, with some differences in the monitor type ID
           | pins. Apple clearly should have realised when designing the
           | Macintosh II that the IBM PS/2 range, release -1 months
           | before it had set the standard for analogue video connectors
           | for years to come. :-)
        
         | heleninboodler wrote:
         | Agreed on the IIci, and not only in specs for its time. Apple
         | mostly made great cases, and the IIcx/ci stands out as the
         | best, in my opinion.
         | 
         | > The names were not very helpful (is a Quadra better than a
         | Performa? What about the LC? Gahhh)
         | 
         | Ironically, the name "Centris" was actually the most helpful
         | since it successfully evoked images of middle-of-the-road
         | performance. "Performa" always seemed like a joke at the time.
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-07 23:01 UTC)