Gaming laptops aren't neccessarily bulky, my Razer Blade 14 is about the same dimensions as my macbook pro 14. They're about the same age and price (2022), the main difference is that the Razer is much faster (plugged in) but the MacBook is vastly more efficient. I do respect how fast MacBooks feel subjectively, but in terms of number crunching and graphics processing the Razer is a lot better. I guess my overall point being youre not going to beat a macbook on efficiency, but there are options out there that aren't bulky or tacky.
I use a razer blade 14 personally... My mileage varies. I love that I can run a lot of stuff on it, but I hate the fact the ram was soldered and the GPU definitely throttles. I recently ran a benchmark for some GPU code I wrote and found that my steamdeck outperforms the Laptop 3060. Its also got terrible battery life and doesnt help that my work laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad P1 beast (FWIW the razer 14 has better battery life with linux than the lenovo) which is great for building code, terrible as a portable. For me the biggest complaint I have about Macs, is well the OS. With the razer at least I can replace windows with ubuntu and most things work. Im really hoping the AMD stuff catches up soon, otherwise I may have to upgrade to a new desktop + macbook air for personal work.
If you ran the benchmark on battery, I'd definitely run it plugged in. It's not a power drain thing, if it's not plugged in (with the dedicated plug) the GPU can't run full throttle (it can't pull enough current from the battery I think). I had the thing for like a year before I found that out.
So far I'm 2/2 for ok batteries, but we'll see in a few years! Weirdly I've had more problems with apple products with bloated batteries, I had to replace two macbook batteries and an ipad. The thing I worry most about with the Razer is how hot it gets.
