Is a Tumi backpack worth it, or am I paying $600 for the logo? Bag Question

I own three bags in that tier and regret two of them. The Tumi does the meeting thing very well — the ballistic nylon still looks new after four years of overhead bins, and that is genuinely worth something if you're client-facing. What it does not do is carry weight comfortably. Past about 7kg the straps become a suggestion. If your bag is laptop, charger, notebook, fine. If you're also hauling a change of clothes and a camera, you want something with an actual harness and you will not find that at any price in this style.

The five-year limited warranty is the number I'd interrogate before the fabric. Read what "limited" excludes — on a lot of premium bags, zippers and wheels are handled differently from the shell, and "normal wear" does an enormous amount of work in most policies. I've had good service from them and I've also watched a friend get told a failed zipper was wear. Ask the store to show you the actual terms for the model you're buying, not the marketing page.

Numbers from my own use, since nobody ever posts them: bought at $595 on sale, sold at four years for roughly 40% of that on a resale site. Real cost about $85 a year. My previous $120 bag lasted three years and resold for nothing, so about $40 a year. Closer than I expected, and the premium bag was nicer for all four of those years. The risk you're taking is that the resale market stays where it is.

Different view: I carried a $150 bag through eight years of consulting travel and not one client ever mentioned it. What people notice is whether you turn up on time and whether your slides work. And if the catching zipper is the actual problem, a bag repair shop will replace a whole zipper for a small fraction of $600.

Whatever you buy, take the 14" machine to the shop. Listed sleeve dimensions are the sleeve, not the opening, and I've owned a bag that technically fit a 14" but you had to fight the padding every time. Twice a day for four years, that's a real cost.

The catching is almost always the slider going loose, not the teeth. Ten minutes with pliers and a candle stub fixed mine and I stopped shopping that afternoon.