As you know, I love my bags. My two current favourite makers are Tom Bihn from Seattle and Billingham from near Warsaw, Black Country (sorry, I mean Walsall, as in Walsall Concerto). Generally, I avoid leather bags because they tend to be heavy. And they don’t come much heavier than this bullet-proof Saddleback from Texas (where else?).
Gabe Weatherhead over at Macdrifer is by his own admission a large person. But even he struggles with the eight-pound (3.6kg in new money) Saddleback Classic Briefcase. As he points out, when empty it weighs almost twice as much as his MacBook Pro. But it’s the smell that gets him. That whiff of real leather:
The… thing I noticed was the odor. It wasn’t unpleasant, but this is real leather. It smells like a cowboy’s ass. The odor dissipates after several weeks, but if you throw an apple in the bag for lunch, it will taste like a cowboy’s ass six hours later. If that’s your thing, then you should be clicking the buy button already.