"It's a real Mac" - I get that!

I remember a whole slew of inexpensive netbooks and the like that were technically Windows XP or Windows 7 machines, but came with a dumbed-down "starter" OS, not enough RAM, only a 32-bit CPU in an era were 64 bits were already becoming standard - the sum of which amounted to a barely usable imitation of a real Windows machine and as a result most of these became garage sale fodder pretty quickly.

I thought I was so clever for buying one of those things for like $190 and putting Lubuntu on it to make it usable. It worked - but the joke was still on me when it died a year later.

This is pretty much a repackaged M1 air from 2020, so it’s a competent machine

Oh i had one of those! The acer aspire one d250, with 1gb ram and 160gb of spinning rust.

Once i got Debian, fluxbox and emacs on it i was able to do java development (with ant and the j2me toolkit).

It was no big issue at all really, once you got linux on it.

I must say, however: the web was much lighter back in the day and electron was still to be conceived. That’s very relevant.