My last laptop purchase was a comparatively cheap £300 HP something-or-other back in 2018, to avoid using my work laptop for personal projects. It only has 8GB

My last laptop purchase was a comparatively cheap £300 HP something-or-other back in 2018, to avoid using my work laptop for personal projects. It only has 8GB RAM, a 256GB SSD and an 8x core i5, but I find it perfectly adequate for my development needs. I'm running the latest Ubuntu on it, and it works nicely for running simultaneously an instance of VS Code, and a Windows VM in VirtualBox, and Firefox. I mostly do reverse engineering projects, and development in node and C++. It's been reliably fine for this, and I'm not worried about it being damaged or lost as it was relatively inexpensive. The camera is awful and the sound isn't great. And I can't run anything that requires massive computational power like AI models, but that's not what I'm really interested in. I would advise just getting the cheapest laptop that does what you need. The expensive Apple kit is unnecessary in my opinion.