I'll gladly take it off your hands for free or for a few hundred.

The prices for core duo macbook pro are sinking like crazy. The macbook is about the same.Might get the mbp after I get rid of thecore duo 2.

CNet published this review of replacing the dual-core chips in a Mac Pro with the latest four-core chips. They found about a 30 percent performance improvement from doubling the number of cores, and that was with rendering apps that are highly processor-intensive and are already multi-threaded. Granted, that was going from four cores to eight rather than from two to four, but the concept of diminishing returns for each additional core still applies. The benefit of quad-core processors for most laptop applications will be 90 percent bragging rights, 10 percent useful performance.

If what you can get now is what you need now, get it now. As previously posted, no matter what you get and when you get it, there will be something better in a few months. That will be as true next year as it is today.

Seems the big jump was powerbook to macbook pro core duo as opposed to core duo to core duo 2.

That was the monster jump. Every software had to be recoded. Luckily, when they created the Universal code, it was already optimized for multi-threaded processing. So the jump from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo wasn't that big of a leap. The big difference is the 32- to 64-bit processors.

The depreciation for macbook duo is less than 15% as opposed to macbook pro which is 50% to 75%. I think the new macbook and macbook pro have more common specs than the old powerbooks and ibooks.
If I were buying new macbook looks like the way to go.