Targus Classic Slim Laptop Bag - Ergonomic Review

The Targus Classic Slim Laptop Bag is a featherweight champion at just 0.58kg. That puts it in the 94th percentile for compactness, which is its main selling point. If you're looking for something that adds almost nothing to your carry weight, this is it. But that extreme focus on being slim comes with some significant trade-offs in other areas, which we'll get into.

Performance for a bag is about what it can carry and how well it protects your gear. This bag's performance is heavily skewed. Its compact score is elite, but its other percentile rankings tell a different story. It sits in the 24th percentile for CPU and 18th for GPU, which suggests it's not built for high-performance, thick laptops. More critically, its reliability score is in the 3rd percentile, and storage is in the 1st. That means it likely has minimal padding and very little room for accessories beyond a slim laptop itself.

Without a specific price, it's hard to pin down the value. But the proposition is clear: you're paying for extreme lightness and compactness above all else. You have to be okay with sacrificing nearly everything else—storage, protection, and versatility—to get it. If your daily carry is just a single, slim ultrabook and nothing else, it might make sense. For anyone else, the value drops fast.

Compared to a Lenovo ThinkPad P14s, which is built like a tank, the Targus offers no protection. Against an ASUS Zenbook Duo, which has room for a dual-screen setup and accessories, the Targus has virtually no storage. Even compared to gaming laptops like the MSI Vector or Gigabyte AORUS, which need robust bags, the Targus is completely out of its depth. Its only real competitive edge is against carrying no bag at all, by shaving off a half-kilo.

This bag is a one-trick pony, and that trick is being incredibly light. The data is brutal on its weaknesses: terrible storage, questionable reliability, and low scores for every user type except 'compact'. I can only recommend it to someone with a very thin, light laptop who literally wants to feel like they aren't carrying a bag at all. For 99% of people, a bag with even median scores for storage and reliability would be a far better daily driver.