EDIT: After heavy use and many year she still holds strong.
A lot of the waterproof lining has shown wear but the overall bag is still in great shape. I have taken it everywhere, competitions, school, work and volunteering events. I do need to send it back to get it polished up, relined and such and I'm shopping around for a new backpack so I can send this one back.

Original:
This backpack is well made. It's country of manufacture is China, though probably designed here.

Let me first comment about the laptop sleeve. It is opened through a side pocket. You unzip it, it opens slide it in.
It can fit a Macbook Pro Retina easily. Though, if you have a neoprene sleeve for that,(mine is this&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Caselogic-PAS-215-15-Inch-Macbook-Neoprene-Sleeve-Black/dp/B00359EXWE/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Caselogic PAS-215 15-Inch Macbook Neoprene Sleeve (Black)</a>)You will need to recognize that the sleeve will accommodate for it. The opening is smaller than the chamber that containts the laptop, by about half an inch. It's actually very smart of them to do that, though, it takes some fiddling to recognize how to easily slide it in and out.

For me, I had to slide it in at an angle from the bottom, so the laptop made it into the top part, where the chamber is cut off from the sleeve( The bottom is level with where the zipper ends, the top, the zipper ends before the full length of the chamber) The sleeve is a bit skimpy on padding for me, so the neoprene sleeve helped a lot in making me feel more comfortable about it.

The backpack has a very nice form factor, it's built to  hug you. I had a sling backpack, so the transition and feel wasn't too different, except fort eh fact that it's a normal backpack, no clip to detach the strap, but in terms of how I'm free to move about, it's very nice.

You can fit quite a lot of things inside as well, it's very spacious. You can probably shove 4 textbooks inside of it.

I'll review this later on as the year go on, and see how long this backpack lasts, probably longer than my laptop!