It was introduced alongside the Centris 660AV, where "AV" signifies audiovisual capabilities, such as video input and output, telecommunications, speech recognition, and enhanced audio.

They are the first Macintoshes to include on-board 16-bit 48 kHz stereo audio playback and recording capability, and S-Video and composite video input and output.

The Apple GeoPort Telecom Adapter Kit introduced with the AV Macs add many DSP-based telecommunication functions, such as modem, fax, and telephony.

[3] Ben Thompson of Byte magazine said in September 1993 that Apple and Silicon Graphics were trailblazers by setting audio and video input as default features of those two Macintosh and of the Indy desktop PCs, which "could change the way businesspeople communicate".

He tested the 840AV as the overall fastest Macintosh, attributing this to its "radically" new AV series hardware features such as dedicated DMA channels for SCSI, serial, ethernet, and sound—but noted that the SCSI DMA performance is completely lost on the legacy architecture of System 7 pending a complete microkernel-based rewrite of the operating system such as with Pink or Copland.

He tested the wealth of AV features such as telecommunications, print-to-fax, speech recognition, and video capture, and appreciated their productivity gains with surprisingly no compatibility problems.