Matt Brodsky Says- “Fly Coach With Laptops!”
I’ve taken bus rides with roosters before. I’ve taken off from Tijuana in a Mexican airliner with paperclips the only thing holding my chair in place to the cabin floor. I’ve been driven by lunatics in mountain passes wide enough for half a hatchback. And now I take public transportation in Philly. So I have no sympathy when I hear someone complain about operating a laptop in your average jetliner’s coach seat.
You just have to learn how to deal with the cramped quarters of a coach seat. Sure, you can’t unfold your Macbook, Thinkpad or Vaio display as far back as you’d like, and the jerk in front of you always leans his seat back so you have even less room. That usually leaves you less than 90 degrees to open your display. Meanwhile, your keyboard on the folded-down tray juts into your ribs. To make it work, you have to pull your elbows in, hunch down, and tilt your head over to see what you are typing.
But it is possible. Would it be easier with an ultraportable laptop, say, with just a 12-inch display versus a desktop replacement? Sure. It would be even easier to drop an extra $50 on an upgrade to a so-called Economy Plus Seat, rather than a plain Economy Seat. Economy Plus adds 3 more inches of pitch to your cramped space, meaning three more inches between you and the seat in front.
My vote, though, would be to suck it up in the regular coach seat. Learn to love that crick in your neck, and the muscle spasms that may begin shooting from your lower back down your legs and then back up again. There won’t be any paperclips. No roosters. No lunatics flying your plane through mountain passes. But you’ll still be tougher than those namby-pambies in first class. Unlike them, with their doublewide seats and their never-ending supply of food and cool drinks, you’ll feel like you’ve earned every second of your battery life.
More – Ultraportables Work Well With Economy-Plus Airline Seats?
By Matthew Brodsky – Laptopical
Monday, May 21, 2007
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