I was almost offered entry into the Young, White Males Writing About Technology Club, but they said I don’t write nearly enough about coffee and laptop bags. I’m not a coffee drinker so don’t expect much from me in that department, but I do enjoy a good gear bag.
Rather than waxing poetic about my favorite daily driver bag, I instead turn your attention to my favorite weekend accessory: the Jack Spade Nylon Canvas Port Case.
I admit to being an unabashed Jack Spade fanboy. Their wallets and bags are fantastic and I am quick to recommend them to anyone that asks. I have been carrying the same Jack Spade messenger bag for five years and it looks as good today as it did on the day I purchased it back in college. I am on my second Jack Spade card case wallet in the same amount of time and it is so good that I bought a second one for when this one bites the dust.
My daily messenger bag and sometimes backpack are designed for carrying around quite a bit of gear that I need to perform my job as a Mac and iOS developer. Most weekdays I’ve got the following in the bag at a minimum:
- 13” MacBook Air
- MacBook Air AC Adapter
- A variety of white cables for plugging in iDevices
- Magic Mouse for when precision pointing is necessary
- iPad
- A dead tree edition of a magazine or two
- A few different Field Notes notebooks and pens with my current projects and ideas sketched out.
On weekends when I am out in the city or visiting friends, I don’t need the first four items on that list. You could make a case that I don’t need any of the items, but I do enjoy having my 3G-enabled iPad with me on the go for coffee shop web surfing. Keeping a notebook with me at all times is also beneficial for those times an idea pops in my head and I need to write it down. As digital as my life is, I can’t imagine ever fully replacing pen and paper for certain tasks like brainstorming and sketching.
Carrying around a backpack or messenger bag designed for a 13”-15” laptop is a bit of overkill when all you’ve got with you is a tiny notebook and an iPad. That’s why the Nylon Canvas Port Case is the perfect day bag1. It has just enough space inside to house the tablet, a few necessary cables and my notebooks. Even better? The bag is light enough that you hardly notice it on your shoulder as you are going about your day.
The Nylon Canvas Port Case has seven pockets. I regularly put six of those to use. The main compartment is where I keep my iPad and any magazines I want to carry with me. The main compartment also has a zipped pocket along the back that I keep my wallet and keys tucked away in.
The secondary compartment has two pen holders and a second smaller pocket along the front of it that I stow two Field Notes notebooks inside of. Anything I may pick up during my day’s journey that is small enough to fit in the bag usually goes here as well.
Along the front of the bag are two zipped pockets. One keeps an iPad charger and 30-pin connector cables. The other, a small bottle of Advil, earbuds and my iPhone. The zippers are some of the sturdiest I have ever worked with. They have a great weight to them and I have never once felt like I was going to snap them off as I have with lesser bags.
The final pocket is along the back of the bag and is my least used. I tend to just throw receipts, boarding passes and other bits of paper I accumulate in there. Every once in a while I will sift through it and find stuff I had forgotten about.
I have had this bag for about a year and I love it just as much today as I did the day I purchased it. I recently enjoyed a weekend in San Francisco where I left my laptop back at home and just used my iPad the entire time I was there. As part of that laptop-less experiment, I also left my other larger bags at home and just carried this bag on the plane with me2. I had more leg room under the seat and none of the shoulder pain from lugging heavy computer equipment between terminals and around the city with me.
Jack Spade bags aren’t cheap in price or construction. They also aren’t bags tailored specifically to fit your specific hardware. If, however, you are someone like me who wants a good mix of form, function and style, my favorite weekend adventure bag is hard to beat. I highly recommend it.
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Some people may refer to it as a man purse. I am not one of those people.↩
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I always check my luggage. I am more than willing to pay $25 or whatever fee it is to not have to deal with what is or isn’t allowed by the TSA, size restrictions and just the burden of hauling more stuff through a crowded airport. In my perfect world, airlines would charge people to use overhead storage for their bags and allow checked bags for free. Having my departure delayed while my fellow passengers try to shove their oversized suitcase into the overhead bin is maddening. ↩