What I Use: Mexico City (Premium)

For our first international trip in almost two years, we’re visiting Mexico City, which can stand proudly alongside Paris as one of the world’s greatest destinations. Naturally, I had some cobwebs to shake off. And some personal technology decisions to make.

I originally planned to bring the HP Elite Folio on this trip, and that would have been a great real-world test for Windows 10 on ARM. But I was distracted by a higher power: Two days before our flight, a pre-release version of Windows 11 leaked, and I installed it on the HP Spectre x360 14 I had previously reviewed (and on the desktop PC I use every day). I debated whether to stick with my original plan or to see whether Windows 11 could work well enough for day-to-day use at this early stage. But the allure of Windows 11 was too strong; all these years later, a new version of Windows still excites me. So I took the Spectre.

On that note, Windows 11, of course, is really just Windows 10 with a new user interface, at least at this point, and so almost everything has worked normally and as expected. I wrote about this experience separately in Windows 11: Real-World Use (Premium), so there’s little reason to belabor the point here. Other than to point out that Paint has never worked again, and that uninstalling it didn’t help as its availability from the Store disappeared after I did so. So I’ve been making do with other image editing apps for the duration of the trip. It’s very inefficient.

As you may recall, I purchased an iPad Air earlier this year, replacing an older 9.7-inch iPad that had developed some performance issues. In the past, I’d usually upgraded the storage on each iPad so I could load them up with movies before trips. But this time around, I stuck with the base 64 GB of storage almost as an experiment.

It’s worked out fine. I downloaded 6 movies in Netflix rather than the Apple TV app since I knew they’d take up a lot less space. And sure enough, Netflix is only using 3.4 GB of storage and there is 24.6 GB of free space available. I’ll call that a win.

Well. Except for a small audio snafu, that is.

As you may recall, ­I previously purchased a pair of Bose QuietComfort Earbuds, and I was able to test them for the first time on a one-way flight to Charlotte in May to pick up our daughter at the end of her first year of college, and then again on the commuter train between Newark Liberty International Airport and New York City. The flight to Mexico City was another great opportunity to enjoy its excellent active noise-canceling (ANC) functionality, and it really is excellent. But I also ran into a problem that potential buyers should be aware of: You can only sync them with one device at a time. And since I wanted to switch between listening to music on my phone and watching a movie on my iPad Air, this limitation proved to be tedious.

What I found is that you should disconnect the Earbuds from the current de...