How to protect your laptop in a coffee shop, ranked honestly.

By Peter Theill · August 2026 · 7 min read

I work from cafés essentially full-time, so I've read all the advice. Most of it is written by people who clearly don't. Here's every tactic I know of, ranked by whether it survives contact with an actual Tuesday.

First, the shape of the problem. Around three-quarters of laptop thefts happen in public places, and café theft in particular is a speed crime: an open laptop on a table is gone in a few seconds. Nothing in the following list needs to stop a burglar. It needs to survive four unattended minutes in a room full of half-distracted witnesses.

The tactics, best to worst

1. Sit like you mean it

Free, and genuinely effective. Back to the wall, laptop away from the door, not at the table right beside the exit. Grab-and-run thieves shop for geometry: they want a straight sprint from your table to the street. Ten metres of obstacle course changes their maths completely. If you do nothing else on this list, do this.

2. Turn on the things your Mac already has

FileVault (on by default on modern Macs) means a thief gets hardware, not your data. Find My + Activation Lock means the stolen Mac is hard to resell and there's a dot on a map. A login password that isn't your birth year. These cost nothing and take ten minutes — but be clear about what they are: after-the-fact tools. They make theft less catastrophic; they don't prevent it. The insurance company still gets a call.

3. Make the laptop itself object — loudly

This is the gap in the standard advice, and it's the one I ended up filling myself. A café thief's whole plan is silence. So give the laptop a voice: an alarm that fires the moment anyone touches a key, closes the lid, pulls the charger or moves the machine — with the volume forced to maximum so it can't be shushed. In a public room, "everyone is suddenly looking at you" is a stronger lock than steel. It's the only tactic on this list that works during the theft rather than before or after it. (What such an alarm needs to get right is its own article.)

4. Ask a neighbour to watch it

Underrated and socially fine — people are pleased to be trusted, and a human with eyes on your seat is a real deterrent. Weaknesses: you need a plausible-looking neighbour, they leave when their coffee's done, and you've made your security someone else's errand. Works best combined with №3, worst as your only plan.

5. A laptop lock

The classic advice, with one problem for Mac users: MacBooks haven't had a lock slot in over a decade. The workarounds are clamp-on adapters and locking docks — hardware you carry, install and unlock every time, to defend against a threat that's mostly four minutes long. If you leave a laptop somewhere genuinely rough for hours, sure. For café life it's the wrong tool; I go deeper in the lock-slot article.

6. "Just take it with you"

The advice every article ends with, and technically correct — the worst kind of correct. It means packing the laptop, charger and headphones, losing the table you camped an hour for, and queueing for the bathroom holding your whole office. It's not security advice, it's giving up. The entire point of the tactics above is to not need this one.

My actual setup

Geometry, FileVault, and a laptop that screams. In that order.

Corner seat when I can get it. FileVault and Find My on, obviously. And when nature calls, I arm Don't Touch — the alarm from tactic №3, which I built because it didn't exist in the shape I wanted: the screen fades to a calm aurora that looks like a screensaver, and if anyone touches, moves, closes or unplugs the Mac, it turns red, sirens at forced full volume, and says things like "Somebody call the barista!" until I'm back and type my PIN. Four-minute absences went from anxious to boring, which is the whole dream.

Sources for the numbers: Everki's laptop security statistics roundup and Kensington's 2025 device-theft study.