Of course your laptop is faster than the cloud, for things that only require a few cores. (Which is most things, thanks to Amdahl's Law.) "The cloud" runs on s

Of course your laptop is faster than the cloud, for things that only require a few cores. (Which is most things, thanks to Amdahl's Law.) "The cloud" runs on servers with dozens (or even hundreds) of cores, optimized for reliability. The cost of that optimization is each individual core is less fast than a core on a laptop or gaming computer. The cloud can bring a lot of computing power to gratuitously parallelizable problems, and it allows more effectively sharing and reusing resources, so you can act as a computing utility company instead of every user needing to buy their own on-prem gear. It doesn't mean the hardware works by magic, which is what is really being expected if you thought optimizations never involve trade-offs.