One reason is that Apple doesn't sell laptops with decent graphics cards. Apple also maxes out at 16 GB of RAM. Another reason is that some people like larger screens and Apple has stopped offering that.
On the other hand, all of those features tend to result in machines that stretch the definition of laptop and usually land themselves into what used to be called "luggables". Even Apple's 17" MacBook Pro was 6.6 pounds and 15.5 inches wide, and if you triple the TDP of the GPU, double the number of memory slots, and increase the battery and cooling proportionately you've got something that can only be transported with special purpose luggage.
You sound like a wimp! I have never had a problem fitting my Asus ROG laptop in my backpack. I got raid ssds, 32 gigs of ram and a 770 GPU. I can do my work from anywhere.
Looking at the current Asus ROG 17" laptops, it looks like they've got a model that's only 7.5 pounds with a battery the same size as in the MacBook Air 13". Or you can get a 10.5 pound machine that's got a battery the size of what's in current 15" MacBook Pros and was in the 17" MBPs. And most of those manage to stay less than 2" thick, but they're all at least twice as thick as a current MBP. All in all, they've got almost as much in common with an iMac as with a MacBook Pro. (Seriously: the 21.5" iMac is only 2 pounds heavier.)
10 pounds of textbooks in a backpack is regarded as a public health problem. 10 pounds of computer cannot be taken seriously as something made for use on the go. We really do need some more specific terminology to draw distinctions between the different classes of hinged computers.
There's no Macbook that's good for gaming, because of the OS and the cooling. There are more and more games on Steam that run on OSX but the performance is usually abysmal (e.g. Dota2 runs around 20% fps on OSX compared to Windows). And they're just too thin to have a cooling that'd be suitable for gaming -- Asus ROG laptops are incredibly well cooled, really.
I disagree. I think the high-end Macbook Pro is one of the best gaming laptops out there. The Nvidia chip is almost half as powerful as the AMD 6850 I used to have in my desktop, which has a giant turbine fan and takes up two PCI slots! Sure, performance in OSX is often poor, but BootCamp and often Parallels solve this problem quite elegantly. It's not too different from booting up a console, I think. Thanks to my Mac, I can travel the world and also play Metro Last Light whenever I feel like. :)
(Caveat: it's almost been a year so it's starting to show its age in some new games. But that's not really something you can get away from. I'm also concerned that the next gen Macbook will only offer an integrated Iris Pro chip instead of Nvidia switching. Don't get me wrong - Iris Pro graphics are impressive, often performing at up to 66% of the Nvidia chip - but it will almost certainly be a performance regression.)
Is the driver situation any better in Bootcamp for Nvidia than AMD? Bootcamp's drivers for the AMD 6750 in my late 2011 MBP were usually many versions behind, meaning some games it had the specs to handle wouldn't even run, and there was no way to upgrade with the OEM drivers. I ended up removing Bootcamp entirely to have more room for the now quite extensive selection of OSX-compatible games on Steam.
I think it is, yes. I don't really follow driver updates all that much, but Nvidia's GeForce Experience application routinely tells me about new downloads (most recently a week or two ago). And it's not a proprietary Apple fork, either: I downloaded GeForce Experience straight from Nvidia as soon as I installed BootCamp and haven't had any problems with it.
Of course, you can install Windows on it but then you lose many of the advantages of using a Mac -- for example, trackpad precision and overall energy efficiency. So if the laptop is going to be used for gaming, then it does not make sense to buy a Mac and install Windows on it. (I've got a rMBP, and I'm using Windows on it most of the time because I don't like OSX and I can't replace the laptop at the moment, but I am very much aware of the disadvantages of this setup.)
All right, I get what you mean, but now we're talking about something else. Your original statement that I reacted to was: "There's no Macbook that's good for gaming, because of the OS and the cooling." Your reasoning that because of their OS MacBooks are not good for gaming is simply not true, considering that you can install Windows on them to eliminate the aforementioned graphical performance issues of OS X. If an ASUS ROG laptop was originally shipped with Linux, would you also say that it's not good for gaming because of its OS? See what I mean?
>So if the laptop is going to be used for gaming, then it does not make sense to buy a Mac and install Windows on it.
Are you sure? I think even if you cannot utilize the touchpad and energy efficiency to its fullest capabilities (which are not really relevant in gaming anyway), the build quality of the shell and the quality of the screen and keyboard makes it a strong contestant even among normal Windows laptops. Plus, you have OS X there (or Linux, for that matter) for non-gaming uses.
Of course is a strong contestant against "normal" windows laptops, but if you are willing to pay what Apple asks for a Macbook pro you shouldn't compare it against "normal windows laptops", but with the high end Asus ROG, Alienware or some custom gaming laptop. And if serious gaming is the driving motivation behing the buy it isn't really a contest.
There's always Boot Camp. For me, at least, this has gotten a lot more pleasant with Yosemite - rebooting into Windows is incredibly fast now!
I've been playing modern AAA games on Medium graphics settings at 1080p (or sometimes 720p) with very good results on an original Retina MacBook Pro. Could I get better graphics with a different machine? Totally, but it's good enough that I don't feel like I have to own a separate gaming machine anymore, which I'm very happy about.