We are thinking the same, and as someone who has been exclusively Mac for work and personal for last decade, I would lean to PC.
He would want to game on his as well as school work so this is a consideration too.
Yep, pick a budget and go to Dell. Again, it's not the best there is, but it'll work, it'll be supported and guaranteed.
No schools have budget for Macs (everything in school is done through chromebooks) - and the vast majority of business machines are windows. stick with Windows
get a refurb from these people, so much better than just sendbacks from Dell, they have teams that rebuild properly and check the hardware before retailing
https://tier1online.com/collections/refurbished-desktops?price=99%3A275
Pagination on Word docs is usually wrong for whichever is the format in use at school if using the other one at home. We have sent an old Mac home for one of us to use so that time is not wasted re-paginating word docs created on Windows or vice versa.
get a refurb from these people, so much better than just sendbacks from Dell
They don't have much in stock i5 wise, they are all older cpus that don't support win11.
