In article .com,
Savageduck wrote:

buying something cheap, only to spend money on it to make it less
sucky is not a good idea.

No need to spend more on it. Those are just possibilities if one wanted
to keep the thing.

Yup! If the inclination grabs one, then that particular MacBook is a good
candidate for an SSD, and possibly another 4 GB RAM. Who cares if it
doesn1t have a retina display if it will do the work.

because by the time you add all that stuff, you've spent about what a
more recent mac would have cost, which has many more features.

Not quite. To start with that $149 MacBook as configured should be enough to
give him a taste. He might, or might not want to beef it up by spending
anything from $150-$350 extra. If he gets infected, he might even decide to
pony up and by something new rather than an upgrade of the old machine.

a not very good taste. it's too old. he won't see much of a difference
from what he has now, other than it being a different os.

and actually, for tony's situation, a used mac mini would be the best
choice, which he could plug into his existing displays and use his
existing keyboard and mouse.

A used mini would do the job for him. However, he is just exploring as part
of a thought experiment, and not quite ready to make any real move towards
conversion to Mac.

a used mini from a few years ago for $50-100 would be a much better
choice than a 7-8 year old macbook. it would be much faster and support
more of apple's latest technologies.

with careful shopping, one could even find a 2014 mac mini for around
$200, possibly less, which would be a *much* better choice than an 8
year old macbook. the older 2012 mac minis are in higher demand than
the '14s, so they're a little more expensive, but also a good choice.