Since you mentioned it is a stipend, and these are suggestions, I would say don’t get any of them, they all suck.

Really what it comes down to is you have $500 off whatever laptop you want, so consider if you want to spend more to get a better laptop, since it seems it will belong to you not the company. Once you choose a budget it’s just a matter of finding a good laptop. I would say minimum specs would be an Intel i5/Ryzen 5 or greater, 16GB RAM, NVME storage (size really depends on what you will use it for) if you plan to game, then discrete graphics is a must, if not, and your job doesn’t include intensive graphics workloads, then avoid a discrete GPU in favor of better battery life.

HP Pavilion Aero 13”

HP Dragonfly

MSI Pulse GL66 Gaming laptop

MacBook Air M2 (This one comes with the large caveat of not being able to natively run Windows, make sure your job doesn’t require Windows programs, also the way that macOS handles RAM, it could be acceptable to go with 8GB for light workloads)

Framework (this is more of a specialty choice, Framework is working hard to pave the way for repairable and economical consumer products)

XPS 13

The list goes on and on and on, the point is definitely do not constrain yourself to their suggestions because they are poor configurations that may leave you struggling later.

Wait until they find out that all their 5G signals are powered by a fiber/coaxial backend, depending on where they live 😂

And satellite is worse than cable or fiber, it only exists for remote places that don’t have that option.