Swissdigital Mainframe Travel Business Backpack REVIEW

4 min readApr 17, 2018

How do you carry your life? This seems like such a philosophical question, but I mean it quite literally. What do you use to carry your most precious belongings in? For years, I’ve considered myself a daily commuter. I travel to and from a location away from my home for work purposes and I typically take my 13-inch MacBook Pro, 12-inch iPad Pro, and various accessories with me. It might sound like a burden, but with technology getting smaller, it’s not that difficult to pack all that around as long as I have the proper packaging for it. I’ve tried out just about every style of computer bag there is and my favorite still remains the standard backpack.

Now, you might think that a backpack is a backpack, but you would be wrong. Not all backpacks are created equal. A few weeks ago, I had the fortunate experience to try out the Circuit backpack from Swiss Digital. I was very happy with how it performed, but I have to admit that it was slightly more than I needed on a daily basis, so, I looked into other items in their product line and found the Mainframe Travel Business Backpack. It’s been great to carry around for the past week and I’m excited to share my experience in this review.

DETAILS

The Mainframe Travel Business backpack is designed to be simple, but hearty enough to take on any challenge from a business meeting to hiking adventure. Inside the main compartment, you will find a padded laptop sleeve and EVA molded pockets for smaller devices like mobile phones and tablets. Like the Circuit backpack, the Mainframe also has RFID protection built-in. The backpack can fit laptops up to 15 inches in size and comes equipped with “S” curve padded, adjustable shoulder straps. It’s made from 600D nylon and measures 18.5 x 13 x 17 inches, which fits carry-on requirements for airlines. Speaking of travel, the Mainframe backpack has the add-a-bag system incorporated into its design so that you can easily put it on a luggage trolley and it has a TSA approved laptop sleeve for hassle-free security checks.

USER EXPERIENCE

I typically try not to make a direct comparison between products too often — especially when they are from the same company — but I couldn’t help but make one big observation about the Mainframe. It’s very lightweight. It’s not that the Circuit was heavy by any means, but the materials that were used to make it were not as light as the nylon that the Mainframe is made from. Carrying the bag is fantastic. I always felt like my load was evenly positioned and weight was dispersed well. I have back problems and I’m always worried that I’ll pack too much around, but the Mainframe made it easy to carry what I need to without adding extra strain to my back.

The internal laptop sleeve is well-padded and wide enough to fit both my iPad Pro and MacBook Pro sitting side by side. The middle pocket is a nice large open compartment for anything you need to stash. It’s very easy to unzip this pocket and just toss items inside. The smallest outer pocket provides a nice option for organizing smaller items like cables and writing utensils. After carrying this around for several days, I feel like it’s very well made and will withstand most daily abuse from business situations.

CONCLUSIONS

I have really taken a shine to the backpacks from Swiss Digital. For one thing, they are affordable as high-quality bags. This pack is currently selling for around $50 and I think that’s in line with other bags of similar quality. I would actually recommend this bag to any daily business people as well as educational purposes. With the larger middle compartment, I could easily see that being used for books and notepads. The Mainframe backpack is a great all-purpose backpack and flexible enough to use for any situation.

For more information, visit swissdigital.us.

Originally published at macsources.com on April 17, 2018.