I regularly do ML professionally and as a hobby on a 2015 MacBook Pro, where I can do computer vision with DL in inference on a CPU. It’s plenty fast enough for PGMs, SVMs, decision trees, etc. Not every problem requires a GPU, but if I’m doing anything at scale or that requires power and speed then I’ll just setup a cloud instance.

I also have a M1 Mac mini that sits on my desk that I remote login to that I have used for GPU-based DL training and inference. It’s great for small experiments and writing the code, but cloud instances are the way to go until the US silicon fabs start opening and prices drop.