laptop borrowing

Apple does not lend computers. Try your local library if they are open. They may have computers in the library that the public can use.

It may be difficult to find laptops now since a lot of schools and businesses have been trying to gather as many useful laptops as possible to hand out to staff, students, and needy families during the COVID pandemic. You didn't mention your exact needs, but normally there should be lots of low cost used non-Apple laptops available. Depending on your needs a 10 year old laptop with in Intel Core 2 Duo CPU with at least 4GBs of memory is more than sufficient to use if you install Linux on it. Just stay away from any computer with an Atom CPU or other low end CPU as they will be extremely slow for multiple reasons. This applies equally to Intel and AMD CPUs. Do a bit of research on the CPU to make sure it is at least a mid-level CPU.

Linux is a freely available open source operating system that has lots of free open source apps available plus you can use all of the current popular web browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome, and Vivaldi. All of the Linux distributions include the free open source office suite LibreOffice as well. If you are willing to learn Linux, then this is a great option to get you through until you can purchase the laptop you really want. Of course Linux isn't for every one, but it is a great option to use on an older computer that may not run the current version of macOS or Windows properly and it gives you more low cost laptop options.

For a beginner I suggest using Linux Mint, or one of Ubuntu flavors such as Kubuntu or Ubuntu MATE as they work well on older systems with just 4GB of memory. The default Ubuntu requires a more powerful computer to work well.

If money is an issue, then I don't recommend the current line of Apple USB-C laptops as they are have a lot of issues due to poor design choices. If you doubt me, then look at all the hardware complaints other users have posted on these very forums.

With used Macs you must be extremely careful to make sure the Apple laptop doesn't have a firmware lock or is still being managed by a school or business, or still has a former owner's AppleID associated with the laptop where they can remotely disable the laptop. Keep in mind even the Mac doesn't currently have a firmware lock enabled, if the firmware lock is enabled for any reason and you don't know the password, then you will be stuck booting to the internal drive and will never be able to boot the laptop to any external media again meaning reinstalling macOS or repairing a non-booting Mac will be extremely difficult if not impossible.