iMac 2006

The iMac core duo came out in January 2006 at the MacWorld Conference and it was the first Mac in the entire lineup to transition from IBM PowerPC processors to Intel Core Duo. In September 2006, the iMac was refreshed with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a cheaper price.

The first Intel iMac was introduce to the public during the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco in January of 2006, it reused the same white polycarbonate enclosure and built‑in iSight design as the preceding iMac G5. The iMac G5 design was award winning (IFDesign: https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/imac-g5/2152), the Intel iMac had also front row feature (FrontRow app and Remote). Like the iMac G5, the Intel iMac came in two different sizes, a 17" Imac (17-inch 1440 × 900) and a 20" Imac (20-inch 1680 × 1050), priced the same as iMac G5, the 17" is 1299 American dollars adn the 20" is 1699 American dollars. During this MacWorld conference, the first MacBook Pro was unveiled to the public, and introduced with it the magsafe charger. In July Apple introduced a Education iMac with a 17" screen with a smaller HardDrive, a combo optical drive instead of the superdrive, this educational Imac replaced the eMac.

The Intel Transition was announced in WWDC 2005, the main cause is power consumption. Intel processors were much less energy-consuming and the performance per watt. This was an argument fore more powerful Macbooks and a better battery life and also meant a cooler computer. To accompany the transition, apple developed Universal Binaries, so apps could be built on both architecture. Apple also developed Rosetta, which translates PowerPC Application for Intel, which meant that PowerPC Mac Apps work on Intel, Rosetta was Discontinued after MacOS Lion (10.7), in 2020 Rosetta 2 was introduced for the Intel X86 to Arm (Apple M chip). The 2006 iMac was delivered with Ilife bundle (Keynote, Pages, Numbers). Apple introduced the Transition Dev Kit at this WWDC so developers could build their apps on Intel, this developer kit had 3.6 Ghz Pentium 4 Processor with MacOS 10.4.1 (Intel Preview), Xcode 2,1 and Universal Binaries Porting Guide. Steve Jobs said it was a 2 years transition, and at the end of 2006 all the Mac Lineup would be on Intel Processors. Between the Intel Transition Annoucment and the 1st Intel Mac, so the iMac Core Duo was released after 7 months and 4 days (or 218 days) to begin with the Intel Transition.

The 2006 iMac last MacOS realise is Snow Leopard, and due to its 32-bit EFI, installing OpenCore is not possible. But there are other patcher, I used NextPostFacto Patcher (https://parrotgeek.com/npf/) and I succeeded to install Mountain Lion and Maverick. And it's been a few weeks since I’ve been primarily using MacOS Moutain Lion and Maverick, and apart some graphical problems or rare freeze, it is very usable. After some tweaks on Mountain Lion, I succeeded in getting the AppStore to work again, to do this I Installed Aqua Proxy (insert link) and modified the app bundle version in info.plist to 2.0. For Maverick it is similar, I installed Aqua Proxy and it worked, but do not modify the app bundle otherwise the App Store won't launch. The only bad side, iMesage and Facetime do not work

This Imac, is amazing, from it's story and intel transition. My Imac is the late 2006 17" Imac with 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo (T7200),ATI Radeon X1600 and a 160 GB of storage, I also upgraded it to 2 Gb of RAM. Talking about the RAM, it can be upgraded to 4 GB but the software will only show 3GB usable, well 4 GB of RAM can be installed, but not all of the excess RAM can be used due to the possibility of memory "overlap". This Imac is one of my favorite Mac, the first intel Mac, and I love tweaking with it or trying old app. But my little favorite is watching movies, from the Imac G5 to the 2011 Imac, there was a remote and FrontRow, that meant we could control movies, slideshows, or music with Apple infrared remote.

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