It's a shame that they do not have a cheap baseline Mac anymore. When I was in college, I bought my first Mac (2007). I didn't have a lot of money, but I bought a Mac Mini for 499 Euro or thereabouts. It was also relatively cheap to upgrade memory afterwards. I actually bought the Mac Mini because my brother and I were experimenting with Hackintosh. It didn't work on my computer, but it did work (somewhat) on his Dell laptop and he was raving about it.
With the Macbook Air 2020, they finally have a laptop that I can recommend again and isn't much more expensive than the MacBook I bought later in 2007 (which was a base model white MacBook, just above 1000 Euro).
The new Mac mini is a decent machine too and while it’s not quite at 500€ it’s still relatively cheap.
I was considering buying that thing but before that decided to see if I could get macOS running on my old desktop, which turned out surprisingly well. Basically everything except sleep and WiFi works.
I’ve now ordered a compatible WiFi card (my dorm doesn’t have ethernet) off AliExpress for 50 dollars. That should be it for a usable Mac workstation. The Hackintosh experiment ended up saving me a few hundred euros.
With the Macbook Air 2020, they finally have a laptop that I can recommend again and isn't much more expensive than the MacBook I bought later in 2007 (which was a base model white MacBook, just above 1000 Euro).