Might work for some but many people like to grab the arms of the chair to pull them into the desk- not a big deal to over come, I suppose the lowered arms could "lock" so when you grabbed them to move the chair they would not come up.

I think I would prefer to just be able to manually raise and lower them. That would be simple, rugged and easy to live with.

Dwane, the current manual method works fine for when one is sitting in said chair and needs to adjust them because someone else was sitting there before, but if the height at which you need the armrests is higher than the desktop (and assuming you are the primary sitter) then you would have to adjust each armrest up every time you sat down and then down again every time you got up (most armrests that I know of are adjusted separately - left and right ones). I am too lazy to do this and I think it would protect my desk when I push the chair in as well as make more space when the chair is not in use. Also, they would still be manually adjustable and you could make the feature optional by adding a valve to release the air instead of compressing it.