On a MacBook, one can download a data set, reboot, install updates, etc and still have the dataset. Those nice-ish AWS instances will wipe their local storage if they are stopped. Sure, one needs backups, but this is still annoying.

Also, at on-demand prices, three months of continuous usage of a single c8gd.2xlarge will pay for that MacBook Neo. The MacBook Neo has a larger SSD than the AWS instances. To be fair, the MacBook Neo has seriously nerfed external IO bandwidth, so the c8gd.2xlarge will outperform it in networking. That being said, I think that any other Mac in the current lineup will utterly smoke c8gd.2xlarge if you are willing to use Thunderbolt-connected network adapters.

Given how little power modern Macs use, a little closet full of Macs with a decent network switch will easily run on a single 20A circuit and will perform better than quite a few thousands of dollars per month of AWS products. Sadly, you’re kind of stuck on MacOS (which is not actually a fantastic server OS) and the management tools are poor. Oh, well.