Apple's main goal with Create ML is to make something app developers can use to add machine learning powered features to their apps. So it makes sense that they

Apple's main goal with Create ML is to make something app developers can use to add machine learning powered features to their apps. So it makes sense that they'd want something that you can train with the hardware you already have as an app developer. It's actually pretty performant. I trained an object detector (from scratch) on my 2016 MBP in about 6 hours[1]. As of macOS 11 also support transfer learning for object detection which starts from pre-trained weights and should converge more quickly if your dataset is similar to COCO[2] but I haven't tested it out yet. [1] https://blog.roboflow.com/createml/ https://blog.roboflow.com/createml/ [2] https://blog.roboflow.com/coco-dataset/ https://blog.roboflow.com/coco-dataset/