Paul Hobbs:
Im curious where you are going to find an equivalent laptop to the mac for £300? You may find something with a similar clock speed and ram, but something to a similar build quality? With a great screen? Mag safe power adapters, huge giant internal batteries, industrial engineering which means the thing will be in one piece in three years?
When people buy cars or stereos they don't just look at the numbers on a page and ignore reality, so I don't get why people do this with computers?
The op seems to specifically want a laptop, so its safe to assume its required for functions other than just streaming music.
if all the pc/mac will be used for is playing music and related things (downloading, spotify, storage of songs ect) then a £300 pc laptop will perform just as well as a £1000 mac. they both just need to output bit perfect digital music. which is a pretty simple task to ask a computer to do. maybe the pc will require more setting up initially but is easy and quick.
a mac may have a better screen, batteries or better build quality. if this is worth paying double or triple for depends on your financial situation i guess.
I wouldn't buy a mac for music personally as my housemates ones don't do very well with copied audio disks or data cd-rw.
also, the new macbook air doesn't even have a cd drive, so if you plan on using cd's you need to buy the additional external drive, or rip/burn using another computer and transfer on a usb stick.
if the laptop will be used for other functions as well as music, then make the decision of what to buy based on these other requirements.