I'm looking to help a close friend that is low-income break into web development. I'm so used to working with a high-powered (and expensive) macbook , and I'm not sure what options are good for developing when the budget is tight.
Any recommendations for a good inexpensive dev setup?
When I need more power I use RDPs with free cloud credits which you can easily get.
If you can get your hands on a raspberry pi at the real price it could be even cheaper. When I was really broke I was just hooking a PI to my TV, with a 30-40$ wireless keyboard+touchpad(logitech). And I was connecting to a remote RDP with free cloud credits.(the PI itself is actually usable with just a light linux distro, but it's kind of limited)
I was basically getting the equivalent of a 1K/2K$(or even 4K$ computer) for like 100-150$ tops.
(for credits, there is GCP which offers 300$ for the free trial, or AWS which have all kind of different offers, from student programs(including online courses), to any kind of entrepreurship program, if you have a basic website or just a landing page with a realistic project you can get a TON of credits, it doesn't have to be a real startup, just a side project that you may or may not finish one day...)
he could also learn some basics about cloud services/hosting that way...
For several years my favorite was Chromebook Acer AC720 with Linux installed, it was a beautiful light weight machine.
So a Chromebook where you can install Linux is a good option for me. I would select the one I can buy from this list:
My wife is a die-hard ThinkPad user, and we've found over the years that unless you buy the expensive business-oriented ones they are, at best, not impressive.
If the budget is less than $1000, you probably want to go with a used machine, a Microsoft machine, or a Chromebook.
https://ithacareuse.org/ecenter/
If there is something like that in your town you might try that.