Thinkpads are pretty reliable as far as laptops go. Lenovo is owned by Thinkpad so thats worth while taking a look at as far as specs, and generally linux works out of the box. The only thing that may require some tweaking is hardware function keys, but thats a rarety.
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.
