Get a Mac Mini, stick it in a closet and VNC into it, that's what I do.
Yeah I would think a Mini would be a better use case than a whole laptop.
Then you emulate iOS on it to debug iOS Safari? Is it fast enough?
Yea, it works well and is plenty fast on a LAN (remote may be laggy). Some things you can't test using emulators, namely App Store stuff I believe, and you need to screw with the resolution/scaling so you can read the text.
I threw a GitHub runner on mine so I can do iOS builds from it.
If you are needing it for web dev, the Inspect browser on iOS works great for that purpose. It is annoying you have to pay $10 for something that should be built in.
Is that a paid extension?
There is also one called literally "Web Inspector" from "And a Dinosaur" or something which I believe is free and a Safari extension which pops up devtools on my iPhone