Nick, once again you are correct; they are all pretty much middle of the road. The choice for college is easy: MacBook Pro. Both my boys have one, the oldest one going on 8 years and still ticking.
Scott
I know of many people who have the older MacBook Pro's and love them as say they just keep on working great. But you will also find that those older MacBooks are stuck with 5 years old mac os.
One thing to keep in mind as well, those older macs are from when Steve Jobs was around. I have one of the newer post Steve iMac and will say it is a total dog. It has issues ever 3-4 months where sections of the OS just stop working. I have apple care that is a total joke as the the professionals at Apple know little about how it works and everything gets refered back to Engineering who is responsible to no-one. Most of the time the only solution is to wipe everything and start from blank. IE, not even restore your old data as sometimes that is what is causing the issues. I've had it that they blamed my Apple ID icloud settings and suggest that I just make myself a new Apple ID. (hang on a sec, isn't that something that Apple is control of putting right?).
