Laptop CPU, i3 or Core2Duo?

[Fred Bloggs]

I maybe be buying a laptop in a few weeks for the lad providing that said #1 son passes his A levels and goes to a half decent Uni. All other things being equal-ish I can see Core2Duo and i3 laptops at about the same price, all with similar hard drives, all with 4Gb RAM, Windows 7 etc... Presumably, the newer platform is preferable?

[xchaotic]

Indeed newer is better.
While on the desktop side i3 are a bit pricy for what they are (still great little overclockers), on the mobile part of it, they don't add that much to the cost and you usually get a much better battery life (the performance won't be noticeably better).
That's on the PC side, where crappy Intel graphics is being used.
Macbooks, on the other hand still use C2D for low-end, because they use a much more graphically powerful and less power hungry nvidia IGP, for which there currently is no euqivalent for the i3/5/7 family (licensing issue/patent hoarding from Intel). You get ca 10 hours of battery life from a 13" MBP or a Macbook and you also get that Uni' hip look

[Fred Bloggs]

Thanks for that. I never thought about battery life.