Of course battery life will be on the average worse, as specific things like video decoding isn't as optimized as it is on MAC, but in terms of CPU heavy tasks like running VSCode with browsing, I didn't find my work MPB to be significantly more efficient.

I personally never really messed with Elementary, but I did run Manjaro on a Levovo Ideapad and things like NVPrime worked out of the box which was surprising.

The cool thing about Linux is that you can install any number of Desktop Environments and just switch between them. I3wm is worthwhile to install along whatever you use, as that is very efficient in terms of screen space, and you can often get by without using the mouse for a lot of stuff, which makes laptop use experience much more efficient.

It's both. A fool and his money are easily parted, it's no coincidence that you're supposed to Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. When you stop having money to give to Apple, they stop rendering services, hardware support and developer tooling.

I like ElementaryOS but I'd give modern GNOME a serious look too. Something like Fedora feels closer to the modern Mac experience than ElementaryOS does, these days. But it's all pretty subjective so you may as well try both once you find a laptop you like.

I'd recommend to get

- Frame.work Notebook (e.g. 13 Ryzen ai)

- Lenovo (e.g. T14s)

- LG Gram

If you'd like to start with Linux as a former a macOS user I'd recommend GNOME with dash-to-dock extension. Probably you could go for Fedora. Alternatively you could use Debian or if you are more exp. maybe plain Arch or a derivate like EndeavourOS.