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Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?

(blog.jgc.org)
251 points jgrahamc | 3 comments | 22 Sep 25 11:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.684s | source
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IanCal ◴[22 Sep 25 13:08 UTC] No.45332926[source]▶
> For me, the ultimate laptop bag is one that looks nothing like a laptop bag; it should look like nothing special at all.

That sounds like almost any regular backpack then. They can also be pretty weather proof, don't need to be carried in one hand, aren't open topped showing what's inside easily, and padded. Any simple and cheap backpack would solve this exact problem but better surely, unless your desire is to be different rather than just to move your laptop from one place to another with little ceremony.

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kragen ◴[22 Sep 25 18:28 UTC] No.45337521[source]▶
When I lived in San Francisco, backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car. High-school students might carry a backpack, college students might carry a backpack, people on the bus might carry a backpack, but mostly not professionals who drove to work.

Maybe that's changed, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zwWpqsI_3s purports to be from 02022, and in its first minute, I count 17 pedestrians of whom 4 are wearing backpacks. So maybe backpacks are mainstream in SF now.

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rpearl ◴[22 Sep 25 23:27 UTC] No.45340901[source]▶
> backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car.

The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car: https://www.sf.gov/data--vision-zero-benchmarking-commute-me...

This has been true for at least a decade. The trend, even ignoring COVID, is that a decreasing proportion do so.

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1. inferiorhuman ◴[23 Sep 25 05:06 UTC] No.45343024[source]▶

  The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car
A plurality do (35% in 2022 vs 17% via transit). Remote work knocked down the percentage that commute by car a bit, but took a bigger chunk out of the other modes (e.g. 34% used transit in 2018 but 17% in 2022).

I've used a messenger bag for decades and never felt marginalized in the least. Plenty of other folks seem to rock employer swag backpacks. vOv

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2. rpearl ◴[23 Sep 25 17:50 UTC] No.45350487[source]▶
Sure, it's just ...pretty odd? for OP to say "backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car" when it's 65% of people who do not use a car in this context at all.

(aside: transit is up to 25% again recently, apparently; https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-home.... And that graph has an even more interesting number which is that in 2019 transit was the plurality.)

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3. kragen ◴[23 Sep 25 19:28 UTC] No.45351606[source]▶
This was 20-25 years ago. No Uber Cab, no Google shuttles, no e-bikes, no rental scooters, Caltrain was diesel and hadn't been renovated, and there was no real-time tracking of Muni buses' positions, so unless you were taking an express bus, you had no idea when the bus would arrive at the stop. And a large part of San Francisco's population was still poor.

There were a lot of people who didn't use a car in that context at all, but people who could mostly did.