Why not just continue to use your m1 pro as your low end client? Save a couple hundred.

that's the plan for now, I just haven't had the M1 Pro slow down/hang/lag enough to give it up. It's a mid-range M1 Pro with 32GB of ram, works for me for dev work, I don't run any local LLM or resource intensive things on it. Battery only has 250 cycles on it so it's not like it dies off-charger.