My laptop before getting my M2 MPB was a top of line ThinkPad P series with all the best on paper specs. As long as I was running benchmarks on it while it was plugged in and I didn't care about fan noise, performance was fine. Once you tried to use it like an actual laptop it was terrible in just about every way. Performance when on battery was either so throttled as to be barely usable, or would kill the battery in 45 minutes. The noise and heat it spit out when doing anything even moderately taxing was extreme. Despite having the most expensive graphics card they offered at the time, interactive 3D and games was still always stuttering and rarely ran smooth. Sleep was hit and miss, so if I just closed the lid and chucked in my bag, there was good chance it would be both hot and dead when I pulled it out an hour later.

There is a lot more to a good laptop than specs, and so far only Apple seems to really get that.

I own couple of ThinkPads myself: an old L-series one, a T490 and lately a P16s. They all are fine. 45 mins on battery on best performance mode is very bad.

I am currently using a P16s with an Intel's meteor lake CPU and an RTX 500 Ada dGPU. I would say it is not that bad. Linux Mint worked OOB perfectly. I get 5-6 hrs of battery life which is fine for me (considering it has a 4K OLED display). The dGPU is mostly idle and the machine is mostly silent unless I am gaming.

The only times I hear the fans going are when using it on my lap or playing games. I do run Windows VM for a big .NET Framework project (coding on JetBrains Rider) and at the same time some coding on Linux. The CPU handles those fine.

These are my personal experiences though. The only issue I can pick is sometimes Chrome shows some artifacts (I think, related the iGPU driver)

I bet you had an Intel CPU. Intel is almost always the worse option since the first Ryzens were released in 2017 or so.

(Intel has to have some sketchy deals with manufacturers, otherwise why design a product like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon line only to put these Intel energy hogs in there?)

In my country at least, these are priced at par or higher than Macbooks

Makes zero sense to get a P series when you could get a Macbook

I know, right?

In the US at least, they usually go on sale. If you can manage to get a corporate discount, you can get them at a sane price.

At December, for example, I got a latest P14s at around $1,100 which is OK price for the machine you get.