The carriages on my daily commute to Sussex and back are so well sound-proofed that you can hear a fly scratching its ear in the driver’s cabin. So when a repetitive tapping noise interrupted my gentle snooze on the way home last night, I set about immediately locating the culprit.

I was expecting it to be an inconsiderate iPod owner tapping away to the beat. In fact, it was another Apple product to blame - the MacBook Air.

The chap in the row opposite was rattling out a document, with his laptop hanging precariously over the edge of the train table, so as not to steal any more than half of the available table space (the unwritten rule of laptop etiquette on the Brighton line).

This meant that every time he laid his wrists on the MacBook to start typing, the rear end of the laptop gently lifted off the surface, with the edge of the table acting as a pivot. Henceforth, every ten seconds or so, between sentences, the MacBook would slap back down on to the table, causing untold distress not only to the Mac fanboy’s fellow passengers, but no doubt to the hard disk and other components being jiggled around inside the laptop.

Such laptop slapping isn’t a problem for me, with my portly work-issue ThinkPad 3000 series; you would need to drop a bag of sugar on the wrist wrest to tempt the back end to lift even a millimetre off the table. But when your laptop weighs only three pounds and is as lean as Kate Moss’s best mate, that suddenly becomes an issue.

Admittedly, there’s a fairly limited set of circumstances where it becomes a problem. But if Jonathan Ive could find it within himself to design an optional dead-weight attachment for the MacBook Air, I and the rest of the Sussex-bound commuters would be forever in his debt.

Tags: commuting, laptop, MacBook Air

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Hardware, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.