Buying a Used MBP/Mac Pro

My wife and I are moving from the US to the other side of the planet next year and we need
upgraded Macs from our present models; she has a Powerbook 12" 1ghz and I am
limping along with a dog of a 2.0 G5 tower.
My wife is happy with her G4 but for anyone else stuck and unable to upgrade
beyond 10.5.8, you know what issues are going on there and will only get worse.
So to keep current with browsing, she'll be wanting an intel laptop, and I'm
directing her towards the 13" Macbook Pro line.
I've had 2 of these 2.0 G5's and both are/were dogs. The first one's power supply died
and the 2nd one that I'm using now has issues with audio, Quicktime and pretty
much any video playback. iTunes will stop spontaneously, and will also do so
whenever I use another app while playing something in itunes, namely songs, etc,
etc.  Since it hasn't caught on fire yet, I'll tolerate it's problems till I can get some
flavor of a Mac Pro.
We'll be buying used units, as we can't afford new so my question is, of the
Macbook Pro line, is there one model that stands out as a good performer or one that
has shown itself to be problematic?  Advantages/disadvantages of the unibodies?
I'm open to any model, but will probably stick
to the 13" size as my wife likes that.  I'm seeing models going for $4-700 which is
within tolerances.
The same question applies to the Mac Pro's as to which one/s do well or have a
poor track record. Also is there a site that has info like this? I've already
googled
"best mac models",
"mac performance guide",
"mac quality guide",
"mac dependability guide/chart" and appledefects.com is a non-site now w/no new
posts since '09.
Thanks in advance!
Eric

I'm not much of a hardware guy, so I don't feel as though I could give you much in the way of input. But I did notice that you posted your initial question two days ago and my thought was that you might get a better response on the MBP boards. You could also ask about Ebay experiences in purchasing laptops.
Is your current 2.16 a bottleneck? I got by with a 2.0 PPC for years. When I finally upgrade to an Intel processor there was a big reduction in render times and the faster graphics improved playback. But as to how the Core2 stacks up against the i5, perhaps check out Barefeats.
Good luck.
Russ

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