Lucky enough to get between 10 and 17% off various apple products through work so tempted to buy a mac book as my lap top cannot handle my extreme footage 😉 so which one will be up to processing some vids?

One with an I7 CPU then choose the screen size that suits you best. I use a 13 inch and hook it up to a large monitor.

Don’t feel that you have to go to the i7. The i5 processors will be fine.

cheers! more in my price range!

Processing power is key to the encoding speed.
Both RAM & HD can be upgraded at a later date if needs be (relatively cheap to do), you won’t regret spending the extra money on a more powerful processor.

RAM can be had from Crucial for a lot less than Apple will charge you and an external HD won’t set you back much either.

Both RAM & HD can be upgraded at a later date if needs be (relatively cheap to do),

In a modern Mac?

Yes except the air and retina MacBooks. Easiest is the MacBook as its a few screws and slide them in. You can even swap the media drive out for an ssd.

i5 will be more than powerful enough i7 would give little benefit for somewhere using it as a hobby. I’d definitely upgrade the RAM though as mentioned as that does have an effect. Don’t do it she purchasing do third part afterwards.

If you want to limit how much you spend avoid the Air and Retina as these are not user serviceable. Go for the basic MBP with whatever screen size you like and upgrade the memory and hard drive yourself later. Keep the old bits it case of warranty work.
Until its been upgraded, don’t expect it to be quicker than a standard PC though. I put a vertex 4 SSD in mine and 8gb and its plenty quick enough now.