Today, I sold my old Powerbook G4 to someone else, bringing to the end my first Mac laptop in the modern (post Jobs’ return to Apple) era. This Mac was where I learned to program PHP and run MYSQL queries, where I first blogged and built my first production level website – www.nybap.org. It lasted for four and half years, much longer than I expected!

Fortunately, last week I purchased a new MacBook Pro 15 inch 2.4GHZ beast which will carry me forward!

I recently upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger and have been enjoying the functionality of Dashboard. I like to think of Dashboard as part information swiss army knife and part virtual library. I have the EggTimer widget which I set when baking my dinner because my oven has no self-timer. I also have various dictionary and wikipedia widgets to allow me to do quicklookups without firing up my browser. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to find this morning that a new WordPress widget had been released which would allow me to post directly from the dashboard. Though its still pretty limited in its functionality I like the concept especially for quick posts. Maybe this will be the much needed insipiration to get me blogging again.

Word from CNET that Apple will “officially” announce on Monday that it is dumping IBM’s chips for Intel’s processors in future machines.

This got me thinking. What will happen to the epithet Wintel that Mac users used to hurl at Windows users? Is Mactel around the corner? If both operating systems share the same processor family what will Mac and Windows geeks have to argue about into the wee hours of the morning?