Apparently I’m not the only one:
I went to www.brenthaven.com and what do I see but their featured laptop bag, the MacBook Slim. The name evoked compactness, and the picture appeared to be a clone of my Pro File 12, so I mustered up the will to spend $100 on a bag, and ordered one.
It came Friday, and it is beautiful, and well constructed. And I sent it back Saturday morning. The thing is huge. Great for frequent travelers who keep their office in their bag, not so great for me, who slips his laptop into its case every morning and every evening and needs only enough extra storage for an iPod.
Virtually the same thing here. I had a Pro File 12 for my PowerBook G4 12″ that I loved; I went back to Brenthaven, saw the MacBook Slim, assumed it was the same thing, and bought it just before a week-long cross-country trip.
And … it is huge. It has a “removable” padded sleeve, but in practice you wouldn’t want to use it as a lightweight sleeve, because (a) it’s Velcroed in there pretty good; (b) it doesn’t have much of a carrying handle; and (c) it’s really too big for the MacBook — I would guess it was a standard Brenthaven part that was the smallest one big enough to hold the MacBook, and then they built the rest of the case around it.
For that cross-country trip, it was decent — at least in the airplane; lugging it from the hotel to the convention center and back again was feasible but not much fun. But for going back and forth to work, it’s overkill. I guess I could have tried to return it, even after using it for a week, but that didn’t seem right to me, and by the time I got really unhappy with it my return period was long since past.
So what I ended up doing was buying a Pro File 15 from the same place I’d bought the Pro File 12 — and for virtually the same clearance price. The Pro File 15 is a little too tall for the MacBook but otherwise works fine, and is much lighter weight to boot.