I use a shitbox of a thinkpad with my dev environment in the cloud, but they run Linux so I can just as easily run it locally if I have no connection. I buy them for $300-500 on eBay, upgrade them to at least 16gb of RAM and a 1TB Samsung SATA SSD. I have 2 cold spares ready to go, credentials loaded, just need to update and sync a few git repos. 14 inch 1080p IPS displays, i5 processor, 16GB of RAM.
The money I save not paying for Apple laptops could pay for a crazy overpowered dev VM until the end of time.
I used Apple laptops for about 10 years until about 5 keyboard replacements with the butterfly switch debacle.
A MacBook is not that expensive and much faster than AWS VMs in the same price range (assuming a few years of usage) in my experience. The network storage of cloud VMs is particularly frustrating for development, unless you use ephemeral storage perhaps.
