Yeah, generally a cloud based approach to training models is better than on your mac. AMD folks have been working on RoCM for some time and it works reasonably well for common models but the AMD GPU HW isn't pervasive like Nvidia GPUs in places like AWS.
If you are looking at using Colab for prototyping, you can also try TPUs which are now supported for PyTorch. Here is the link some additional info including some Colab NBs: https://github.com/pytorch/xla
You really don't though? The top of the line comprable configuration has a significantly worse display, 75% of the SSD storage (that's also significantly slower), a worse graphics card and costs ~$4700.
> for $6099USD. I wonder how it will handle the thermals
45W is easily doable, gaming notebook vendors can easily get up to 100W in a mobile package.
Apple and other "major brands" had a string of borderline laughable engineering mistakes over the past 5 years.
For example, in their latest 12 inch Macbook, they simply put a blower to work as an exhaust fan, but then forgot that the keyboard membrane has no sealing just above it.
* 2.4GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz
* 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory
* AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory
* 8TB SSD storage
for $6099USD. I wonder how it will handle the thermals.