Vacuum bags

Ryanair has spent years perfecting the art of charging you money to bring your own belongings onto a plane. The carry-on allowance is generous enough to feel like a compromise and small enough to punish you for a week away. Anything beyond that and you are paying for hold luggage, which is a tax on not travelling light.

Vacuum bags are how you refuse to pay it.

You pack your clothes in, seal the bag, and compress it by rolling it or running a hoover over the valve. The air leaves. The clothes remain, exactly as many of them, now taking up roughly half the space. A week's worth of clothes, including things that would normally require a checked suitcase, fits inside a backpack. It is just physics, but physics has never felt more useful.

The home use case is less dramatic but equally satisfying. Off-season clothes compressed and stored in a drawer, taking up a fraction of the space they would otherwise occupy. A wardrobe that is actually organised because there is room in it to organise things. Less chaos in the places you look every day.

There is no app. There is no subscription. The battery life is, in the sense that there is no battery, infinite.

But if the measure of good technology is how directly it solves a real problem, vacuum bags are difficult to argue with. They do one thing, they do it completely, and they have saved me a non-trivial amount of money in Ryanair baggage fees.

Sometimes the best engineering is just a bag with a valve.