>I tried Virtual Machines, probably had half a dozen MacOS VMs over the years in VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM. Getting MacOS working in a VM is difficult, inconsistent and (at least on my machines) performance isn’t great. Apple strongly does not want you doing this, you’ll always be swimming upstream.

Idk. A year or two ago I wanted to test something on Mac. I searched a bit and found an image and probably copied a qemu config from somewhere, and it worked without any obvious problems. I'm sure there was a performance hit, but it wasn't unusable by any means, and I don't run the latest hardware.

I’m wondering if a cloud VM is would be the best for the author’s needs.

They clearly don’t want a Mac laptop or a laptop form factor at all for various reasons, maybe they’d be better off with a raspberry pi or even an android tablet plus keyboard and mouse remoting into a Mac VM in the cloud.

The cloud part would also mean that the cloud provider is going to handle all the difficulty in setting up a Mac VM for you.