The library seat is worth guarding. So is the laptop guarding it.

By Peter Theill · August 2026 · 4 min read

Every student knows the exam-season ritual: you arrive at seven to get a desk, and by ten your laptop has a second job — holding your seat while you get coffee, food, or relief. The desk is priceless. The laptop holding it is worth a thousand dollars and all of your coursework.

The library feels safe. Quiet, studious, everyone's absorbed. That feeling is exactly why campus police departments keep publishing the same weary bulletin: laptop theft is one of the most common campus crimes, it spikes in libraries during exams, and — as Berkeley's campus police put it — it is almost entirely preventable, because almost every stolen laptop was left unattended.

Why libraries are actually a thief's favourite room

• Unattended is the norm. In a café, a laptop alone on a table is slightly unusual. In a library at 2 pm, half the laptops are holding seats for people who are elsewhere. A thief doesn't look suspicious browsing past them.
• Everyone's headphones are on. The room's attention is the lowest of any public space. Nobody hears a quiet zip of a bag.
• Exits are excellent. Big buildings, many stairwells, a stream of students with laptops under their arms. Yours doesn't stand out.
• The absences are long. A café bathroom run is four minutes; a library food run is twenty. More time, more cover.

The standard advice, graded

"Take it with you" — and lose the desk you queued for at 7 am? Nobody does this in December and everyone knows it. "Ask a neighbour" — decent, if your neighbour isn't also asleep on their own laptop. "Use a lock" — library desks rarely have anything to anchor to, and MacBooks don't have a lock slot anyway. "Find My" — turn it on, absolutely, but it starts helping only after your thesis has left the building.

The laptop is already guarding your seat. Give it a way to guard itself.

The move that fits the library

A deterrent alarm is almost comically well-suited to a quiet room. Arm it, and the screen fades to a calm aurora — to everyone else, a sleeping laptop holding a seat, like fifty others. But the instant someone touches a key, closes the lid, unplugs the charger or lifts it, it turns pulsing red and screams at forced full volume — in a room where a dropped pencil turns heads. The would-be thief doesn't get four quiet seconds; they get two hundred students looking up from their flashcards at whoever is holding the shrieking MacBook that's yelling "You're not my owner. I can tell. It's the hands."

That's the reason I built Don't Touch — originally for my café problem, but students adopted the use case instantly, because it's the same problem with higher stakes and better acoustics. Come back, type your 4-digit PIN, and it fades back to your notes like nothing happened.

One more honest note: an alarm is a deterrent, not a lock. For a twenty-minute absence it's the right tool precisely because the room is full of witnesses. Leaving any laptop alone in an empty building at midnight is a different game — don't.