Laptops come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. If I was buying for battery life, I would think the new AMD Ryzen 4000 series would be high on my list though.

For reasonable portability, decent gaming and excellent CPU performance, the laptop in the article is $1450, though availability is still low.

For seriously good performance on a tight budget, the Asus TUF 506 (A15) lines packs a Ryzen 48xx and up to an RTX 2060 into a $1000-1200 laptop. The screen has high performance on paper but older versions of this laptop had bad things to say about the screen, so I'd wait for reviews.

There are other Asus options like the A17 and Zephyrus G15 which are all worth a look, and starting to show up in stock here and there.

Me, not really. We were using the Razer laptops at work, but they had some frustrating QC issues on the bigger 15" and 17" models. I had a coworker that liked her Razer Blade but do know what you are getting, it is pretty underpowered.

Personally, I can deal with reasonably under-powered, I still have a desktop when I need and I'm mostly proprietary engine technology that doesn't need as many resources as say an artist or designer who spends most of their day fully in-game content.

I do a lot of rendering work so I have an eGPU (Razor Core) and the integrated Intel GPUs aren't so bad anymore.

So, having said that I have the most recent XPS 13 2-in-1 as my primary machine, it's for sure a compromise in power, but it does most of what I need it to, and I often RDP into the desktop when it's not.

I choose the 2-in-1 because it was the first 13" laptop that I could find that had 32GB of memory and met all my other criteria (USB-C charged, etc) I understand the non 2-in-1 model now has a 32GB configuration so I'd consider that for sure.

Compilation is my largest frustration at this point really, but I'm playing with various remote/distrusted build options to speed up that workflow.

This probably isn’t what you’re looking for but I’ve been playing RDR2 via Stadia and it works surprisingly well. It’s probably not at the level a hardcore gamer would want but streaming is well worth a look if you’ve been put off laptops because you want to play a few games now and then.