So i know this is dumb...

but could some one please explain the difference between the core duos and the core 2 duos? I've got the 1.83 ghz macbook pro. what do these new ones have that I dont?

I'll do my best. The core 2 duo is the latest and greatest chip from Intel. It supposedly gets better battery life and has been confirmed to get about a 10% (on average) increase in performance. Engineering wise that's pretty cool but it's not a huge jump in performance. You will probably be really happy with the core duo.

The MacBook Pro itself has had some upgrades, but they are just upgrades of what you get normally. For example, you now get 1 GB of RAM standard and a 120 GB harddrive standard. I think a 6X SuperDrive is in there too. The price has remained the same however.

Don't get angry over this or anything, computers are rarely the top end for long.

The core duo 2 have a bigger L2 catch and some other improvements that gives them a slightly faster speed without any effects to battery life. So not worth upgrading for, just a slight speed bump.

The 1 gig of RAM as standard should be in every new Mac, without exception. The number of people who think Macs are slow because of the RAM is quite high.

C2D has more pipeline stages an an extra Integer ALU, as well as an extra 2mb cache. Synthetic benchmarks show a 2% - 30% performance increase (in Windows, OS X would be similar) but on average I'd estimate 15%. In real life, this translates to a very small advantage. In fact, if the FSB of the motherboard is the same (667mhz) then the performance increase is even smaller and I believe this is the case with the current MBPs.

C2D is much stronger when it comes to video encoding. h.264 is 20% faster!

Having more L2 cache BTW, actually cunsumes more power, since you have a lot of transistors to keep powered. Core 2 Duo has almost twice as many transitors as Core Duo. Tests have shown that both chips consume the same amount of power at idle and load and that there is virtually no difference in battery life. Therefore C2D has a better performance per watt than Core Duo, but any extra life being squeezed out of the new MacBook Pros is likely to be efficiences elsewhere or better powermanagement somewhere.

If you have a Core Duo, it should keep you happy for some time yet.

have we forgotten, what i think, is one of the most important differences between CD and C2D ?

C2D is a 64-bit processor. Leopard (Spring 07) will be full 64bit capable.