Just wanted to make some suggestions for ideas and not meant to critique -- one can get a fairly good laptop for coding nowadays at a fairly low price; just don't stick with a Mac like what everyone thinks you have to. (which costs $1000+)

I just randomly opened woot.com's laptop section (https://www.woot.com/category/computers/laptops) and there are already a few laptops under $300 with 8GB ram. If he really dislikes Windows, he can install Linux on it like you said. (though Win10 is pretty good nowadays with WSL) Can said well-known VC shell out $300 to buy him one of these?