The tax-free weekend has come and gone, and there is not a shiny new MacBook Pro in my grubby hands. Nor is there a sales receipt indicating that a new MacBook Pro is on the way, either.

As those who have had the (mis-)fortune to know me for the last two months know, I had been really looking forward to this past weekend. I was going to buy a new laptop, a 15" 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro with 100 GB of hard disk and 1 GB of RAM. I was so excited that I would say stupid nonsense like this:

ME: You know what I’m going to do this weekend?

COWORKER X (looking up from his Important Work): No, what?

ME: Buy a MacBook Pro. OMG ROXOR! I’m going to save $150 in taxes and shipping and, ‘cause my wife’s a teacher, I’m going to save even more over that! (rubs hands together a la Mr. Burns in “The Simpsons”) Exxxxxcelllent.

COWORKER X (bored, having heard the story about fifty times already): Oh, that.

After a while, COWORKER X would then don his headphones to drown me out, and I would be left to daydream about actually using iPhoto on a machine that doesn’t pause for TEN FREAKING SECONDS when clicking on the scrollbar to navigate within my photo library. Or being able to edit those movies I took of my daughter without the sound skipping or dropping out.

I paid my dues having a G3 iBook. It’s time to party, right?

Well, earlier this week, a friend gave me the sage advice to back off. Why?

• WWDC is on 7 August 2006.
• Intel is releasing the Core 2 Duo (Merom) mobile processor at the same time.

Hence, it’s possible that Apple will speed bump their MacBook Pros with the new, better processor. Also, since the Merom supposedly uses 40% less power than the previous part, it might not be so, um, uncomfortable to use as a laptop computer. But mostly, I’d be seriously bummed out if I spent all that money to get something that was obsoleted a mere day later by the Next Big Thing¹.

The thing is, putting Core 2 Duo CPUs in their high-end notebooks is a move that makes sense. Dell and IBM will be announcing new machines based on these parts at the same time, so it behooves Apple to move in lockstep, right? Especially since the rumor mill is in agreement that the Mac Pro — the new desktop replacement for the PowerPC G5 — is going to be unveiled and it will most likely sport a multiple Core 2 Duo configuration.

So, I’m giving up the $150 or so I might save in taxes in order to buy something that might be announced by Noon tomorrow. We’ll see. If it turns out that The Steve doesn’t announce new MacBook Pros during his keynote addess, then my upgrade for my venerable iBook G3 will have to wait for MacWorld… in 2007.

UPDATE. I lose. No Merom mentioned in the hardware section of the keynote, and I seriously doubt that Steve is holding out to the “just one more thing” section of the keynote at the end. Guess I’m going to keep being slow for another five months.

¹ I bought my G3 iBook eight months before the first G4 iBooks hit the streets. That ticked me off, and that was eight months of separation.