Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you're still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying "well I buy a cheap used laptop" or "well I buy coffee beans and make my own coffee" are completely missing the fucking point.
Don't tell yourself your consumption is moral. All of us make unethical choices every day because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Accept your shame and guilt and let it drive you to do better.
You can pick up a refurbed MacBook for under $800. Or maybe it's a hand-me down. Or maybe, like me, at the end of a contract their employer said "We ran out of money so consider your laptop payment."
A friend of mine who used to be a coworker got an i9 MacBook Air because the company he worked with liked him (were an MSP, so we support other companies). He doesn't even use or like em, I think his wife used it.
Or you could just buy a new laptop for $800 and actually get a usable amount of RAM.
The specs on base tier MacBooks tend to be so bizarrely low it's laughable. Literally comparable to the PC I had over a decade ago (save for the CPU, of course). I don't know how they get away with it.
I mean,.seriously, why would any sane person spend $800 on a laptop with only a 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM? That's literally the specs of an $800 laptop from 2013! Apple is blatantly scamming people and getting away with it.