A Picture Share!

David Gartner Photography (225 days)

Has anyone come up with a laptop guide to SF Cafes? Could be a very valuable guide for the officeless.

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mikek (225 days)

No, but I just had a conversation about this with a friend. I rattled off a ranking of cafes in my neighborhood with the following qualities:

1. Free wifi (with a distinction between purely open Wifi and "login" wifi, where you have to have some kind of nominal login process to use it)
2. Fast wifi
3. Outlets
4. Decent food
5. Sketch factor

#4 is mostly exclusive to #3, #2 to #1 (i.e. you get one or the other, but not both). If you want #1, #2 and #3, you will not get #4 and you may have a high #5 because these are cafes which are trying to attract more people with laptops to push out the people who sit there all day talking to themselves.

Note that this does not take popularity into account. The higher a cafe scores on these things, the greater its popularity. So cafe Petra, which has #1-#4 and a low #5 is often full for hours. Ritual and Cafe du Soleil have managed their popularity by removing #3.

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