What I Use: Mexico City (January-May 2025) (Premium)

We’ve been in Mexico City since mid-January, but we’re finally heading back to Pennsylvania this weekend. That’s a bit over 15 weeks, or just shy of four months, and that’s by far the longest consecutive period we’ve spent outside the United States. Our goal this year is to spend at least six months in Mexico, and while we don’t have return plans yet, that should be easy enough to achieve. One possibility is us coming back here after the fourth of July and staying until just before Thanksgiving, which would be another four and a half months if we pull it off.

We’ll see. But first things first.

Travel

We finally flew here the way I’ve always wanted to fly, with the most minimal of luggage imaginable. To get there, I purchased a Ravenna Mini Rolling Case from Rick Steves last year, but this was the first time I was able to fly with it. This tiny rolling luggage measures just 17 x 13.5 x 8 inches, well under the roughly 22 x 16 x 8 inch size that’s standard for flights in the European Union (and the roughly 20 x 14 x 9 inch size of the replacement for the full-sized Ravenna, now called the Riga Rolling Case.) Apparently, it’s too small for most Americans, too, as Rick Steves is selling it now for just $50, one third its normal price, in the bargain bin part of his online store.

Anyway, flying here with that carry-on was, of course, wonderful, and for the first time in memory, recent or otherwise, I came here without any review laptops. But I also brought my HP Renew backpack for the laptops I did bring. (More on that below.)

We found our apartment in January 2022 and finalized the purchase that May. During that time and since then, we’ve flown to and from Mexico City dozens of times. But we’d stopped exploring the rest of the country, in part to focus on our apartment, which needed furnishing and various upgrades. And in part because we love this neighborhood and found it hard to leave. Previously, we had visited Puebla, San Miguel de Allende, and Guanajuato. And we’ve wanted to explore more of Mexico as had before we got the apartment.

This trip was different. After three years of sticking to Mexico City, we visited three other places during this stay, which was a nice return to form. In January, just after arriving here, we spent about five days in Puerto Vallarta visiting with Richard Campbell and his wife Stacy. In mid-March, we went back to San Miguel de Allende with friends who were visiting from Boston. And earlier this month, we spent a long weekend in Oaxaca. We flew on the first and third of those trips, and we took an amazingly luxurious bus back and forth on the second.

My normal/EU-sized Rick Steves Ravenna bag is here in Mexico City now, so I was able to use that for each of these trips. And based on what I’m bringing home–again, more on that below–I will likely leave the mini rolling case here when we leave and fly home with the larger bag.

Randomly, I almost made a fourth trip while here, and this would have been a work trip back to the United States, which would have been a first: I was invited to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event. Twice, come to think of it. Once in New York City and the second time to the main event in Redmond. I was never going to New York from here, but I initially agreed to go to the main event. And then it didn’t make sense because of the costs. But I feel like something like that will happen eventually.

Laptops and reviews

For the first time I can recall, I came to Mexico City without any review laptops, so I brought two of my own: My Surface Laptop 7 and MacBook Air M3. But this was by design, as I knew I’d be getting laptops to review while here. The first of those review laptops–the Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition–arrived much later than usual, in early March, and so I reviewed it at the end of that month. The amount of time that laptop took to arrive was concerning. But then I signed up two review three more laptops, two from Lenovo, and one from HP. And none of them arrived.

Gulp. This was beyond concerning. So when HP and Lenovo separately contacted me about reviewing other laptops, I had to explain that something had gone wrong. I had never had any issues getting laptop shipments from these companies here in Mexico, but the first had taken almost three weeks to get here. And then next three never arrived. Lenovo checked and discovered that they had been returned, no reason given. And I arranged to have HP ship me a second laptop to my son, who works for FedEx, in Rochester, New York. My expectation was that he could ship it to me here, but when he looked into this, he discovered that he would need a lot of information only those companies could provide. So he’s going to send it to me next week when we’re home instead. I’ve arranged for a similar belatedly re-shipment with Lenovo as well.

And that explains why I only reviewed a single laptop while I was here. In all, I was offered six or more laptops between those two companies. And I have a few other devices that will arrive at home next week or later, too.

More on that soon. But I normally ship review laptops back to the companies from here, too, and I am nervous about that given what happened this time around. After discussing this with Lenovo, I agreed to bring the two laptops I do have here–the X9 noted above and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition I had reviewed in November; I didn’t have time to ship that one back at the time–home in my carry-on luggage. (This is why I need the bigger bag for this trip.) I’ll ship the empty boxes from here. And Lenovo will send me other boxes so I can ship the two devices back when I get home.

Electricity and Internet

I’ve often noted that the electricity and Internet services we receive here in Mexico City is more reliable than in Pennsylvania, and that was certainly the case here. We had no electrical issues the entire time, and while our Internet did go out once–triggering this outdoor episode of First Ring Daily–it was a billing mistake, the type of thing that seems to happen in Mexico sometimes. That is, we paid the bill normally, the company recorded the wrong amount paid, and then one day it just turned off the service. My wife paid the bill (again) at the local Oxxo, and it was back on before she could walk the one block back to our apartment.

I still haven’t broken into my Huawei router here so I can turn off the Wi-Fi it provides. So we still have three wireless networks, two from the router (one 5 GHz and one 2.4 GHz) and then a better one from our Eero 6/6E nodes. They’re always worked flawlessly.

Meanwhile, we lost power twice back in Pennsylvania, which I know from the alerts I get from my Eero app–the Eero network back went down those times, of course–and, in the more recent incident, from the Apple Home app: Our HomePod 2 speakers heard an alarm going off and pinged me, allowing me to listen in and, had anyone been there, talk over those speakers too. We have a neighbor looking after mail and packages, so she was able to get in and turn off the alarm. (Which was nothing, and just triggered by the power being out for too long.)

? Google Fi and cellular data

In the The Perfect Phone (Premium), I voiced a worry I had that Google at some point would contact me to tell me I’d been using its Fi cellular service outside the U.S. for too long on this trip. You can read that article for all the details, but it turns out me using third-party data eSIMs “solves” this problem, albeit at a cost. I was just starting to research alternatives when two things happened back-to-back. I discovered a so-called global wireless carrier (MVNO) with no time limits called Fonus. And then Google updated Fi pretty dramatically.

Fonus was compelling enough on paper that I tested it, starting with the Pixel 9 Pro XL I had recently switched back to. This did not go well at all. I never got the data network bit working at all, and the service requires you to use its app for phone calls, text messages, and voice mail. Both of these issues make Fonus a non-starter for me. But I did at least test it on the iPhone too before cancelling it entirely. I had the same issues, and in doing this, I discovered that I had to delete the eSIM from the Pixel before I could even install it on the iPhone. That’s silly, and it obviates the self-service nature of eSIMs, which can normally be enabled/disabled as needed on whatever device. Whatever. Fonus is too weird, and there’s just something off here, at least in Mexico City.

The recent Google Fi update was interesting enough that I upgraded my Unlimited Standard plan (unlimited calls and texts, 50 GB of data; text and data support and affordable calls in Mexico and Canada; 25 GB of hotspot for $50 per month) to Unlimited Premium (unlimited calls and text, 100 GB of data everywhere. 50 GB of hotspot, and data eSIMs for four additional devices for $65 per month).

? Banking, money, and taxes

Money is always an issue in Mexico and on this trip, that issue was heightened by a few unrelated, but also sort of related, problems.

First, my bank, Ally, didn’t send me a new debit card when it expired. I spent an hour on the phone with customer service after we arrived here, and they had agreed to send the card to Mexico. I was a minute away from finishing up this call, they just needed part of my address, when the call disconnected. I figured they would call me right back. But they did not. So I called them back, explained what had happened, and asked if I could reconnect with the person who had all my information. Nope. I would have to go through the entire process again. I refused, told the person to look at how long we’d had our accounts and what a basic request this was. And then I hung up. When we get home, we will be switching banks.

As you might imagine, Mexico and other international destinations cause all kinds of problems with online services. Some are minor, like Netflix offering slightly different catalogs of content, and some are major, like Hulu not working at all. For the most part, these issues don’t impact the financial-related services we use: You sign in, there’s some 2FA prompt, and you’re good. But this didn’t work with our business PayPal account, which refused to let me access the service. So I spent another hour on the phone, this time with PayPal, but equally unsuccessfully. In that case, I got lucky: One of my mobile devices was signed in to this account, and I was able to use that to transfer money during this stay.

April 15 came and went, and while we did what we could to get our accountant all of the financial documents he needed, an interesting exercise from outside the country, we fell short. Our accountant told us not to worry about it, an extension won’t hurt, and you want to get this right the first time. So we punted on this and will finish our taxes when we got home. In the good news department, virtually everything important is now digital, and as my wife has monitored the new (paper-based) mail that we’ve received, she’s reported that 100 percent of it is junk. We literally get nothing of value through U.S. mail anymore.

My daughter had been using a Surface Pro for a few years, and while she liked the form factor and pen for handwritten notes, it had gotten slow, and the battery life was terrible. When the kids were out in March, she brought it along and I did what I could to help revive it. But that didn’t help much, so I suggested that she wait until we got home in early May as I almost certainly had something she could use, laptop-wise, there. And that might have worked, but then she had further issues after going home. So I told her to look at the Surface Laptop 7 and MacBook Air M4, and she picked the latter in that new light blue color. The base RAM is finally OK on most of Apple’s products, but I upgraded the storage to 512 GB and paid for it with the Apple Card I used previously for my own MacBook Air, for the zero interest. I coincidentally just paid that off, actually. I thought last year’s laptop buying spree was a one-off, but I guess not.

Apartment stuff

It’s been a while since we’ve done anything meaningful to the apartment, which is fine. It’s pretty much where we want it and doesn’t require any major fixes or changes. I did bring my Pixel Tablet with its stand here, and we’re using it in the kitchen as a smart display for photo slideshows, as we do at home in Pennsylvania. And because we don’t need two JBL Charge 5 speakers here anymore–we put a pair of HomePod Mini speakers on the TV on the previous trip, and we only need one speaker if we want to listen to music outside on the balcony–I’m going to bring one home with us.

Our apartment did get two major upgrades–at least to us–both of which are at the front doors. We have very steep stairs up to those doors, and everyone who lives here has been asking about getting some kind of handrail, and that finally happened on this trip. And the security system that lets us unlock the door using a fob had gotten very unreliable, and in our case, only one of our fobs was working. We thought they were just cheap or something, but they replaced the in-wall system over two days and now all the fobs–ours and everyone else’s–magically work fine. I had expected to at least need to reprogram them, but they just work.

? Writing

I came to Mexico City with goals. In my case, writing goals.

My primary goal was to make significant progress on the book I’m writing with my wife, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City (2025), which we had shipped in an early preview version back in December. This went slowly at first, as it often has, but on the last day of April, one year after announcing the book, we were able to take the “preview” tag off the book. It’s not “done,” it will never be done. But this change indicates that all of our major neighborhood chapters are written to some acceptable degree. We’ll work on the reference material in the back of the book when we get home, with the goal of getting the whole book to that “some acceptable degree” state by the end of June.

I had also hoped for some clarity on what to do with the Windows 11 Field Guide and Windows Everywhere, both of which I want to update. Here, I made little progress. I did block out–and not for the first time–some content tied to the new AI functionality. That will almost certainly constitute a sort of final major set of updates for this version of the book, which has grown far too big. So I guess both books will simply move into new editions, both with major rewrites. But l didn’t do much in that regard.

I had plans for the site, too. But we were only in Mexico for a few days when Google unceremoniously took away my access to my business YouTube channel without warning. I wrote a ginormous article about that episode, but the more important outcome was me rethinking my reliance on Big Tech. And while the fallout from that is perhaps wider than many understand, the first and most obvious public-facing work was my Online accounts series, which is still ongoing. The biggest part of that, of course, will be whatever NAS I purchase this summer while we’re still in PA. So there’s more to come there.

✈️ Coming with

Thanks to the laptop review issues noted above, I’m flying home with four laptops, two my own (Surface Laptop 7, MacBook Air M3) and two the Lenovo review units. My laptops will go in the HP Renew bag, but I’ll throw the unboxed Lenovo laptops in my carry-on luggage and protect them with the clothes I’m bringing home. I have just about everything I need in Mexico clothes-wise, but I have spent years trying to find replacements for the black and navy blue dress shirts I love so much, and having failed, I bring three or four back and forth with me when we fly (for now). So I guess that’s going to work out. At least for Lenovo. And as noted above, I’m also bringing up one of our JBL speakers.

? Buy time

Tied to us being home, I have a scheduled appointment with my doctor and will make two others, with my eye doctor and dentist. And I have an in-person meeting scheduled in New York next week, and then it’s off to Seattle for Build a few weeks after that. But being home also enables a few things that are difficult or even somewhat impossible here in Mexico City. I have access to more of my stuff, and I have many laptops and other resources at home that I can’t access here. And I can more easily and more cheaply buy things there. Electronics, in particular, are very expensive here.

As this trip starts winding down, I’ve started ordering things online so that they’ll arrive when we get home or shortly thereafter. (And we have a neighbor who can collect mail and packages if something comes early.) Some of these are just normal, everyday items, like close. Others are perhaps of more interest.

Based on a question about TV streamers in a recent Ask Paul, I ordered a Roku Streaming Stick Plus and Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. I have an Apple TV 4K, of course, and also a Chromecast with Google TV, but that latter device has since been replaced by a Google TV Streamer (4K), which I may also get for whatever comparison/write-ups come out of this. (It’s a bit expensive at $100, but I’ll look around; there are also other Google TV-type streamers I’m looking at that are cheaper.)

Based on the happenings that led to Thinking Differently About Phones (Premium), I ordered a Samsung Galaxy S25+ through Google Fi. I also updated Google Fi from Unlimited Standard to Unlimited Premium per the recent subscription tiers changes, as noted above. And I ordered two cases from Amazon and will return the one I don’t stick with. (This doesn’t preclude future phone changes. I’m still interested in a folding phone and maybe this will be the year.)

The phone tripod/selfie stick I’ve kept here in Mexico City is garbage, so I’ve been looking for a replacement. I ordered a Raycue MagSafe Magnetic Folding Stand based on an ad I saw on Instagram (I know). But we’ll see if that works out.

Per the discussion in Here We Go Again with the iPad (Premium), I will soon order an 11-inch iPad Air M3 (256 GB, in starlight) to replace my too-large 13-inch iPad Air M2, which I’m trading in. (The iPad is $699, which, yes, is expensive. But Apple is giving me $470 on trade and I can pay for this thing with no interest for just $19 per month for 12 months.) I would have done this already, but Apple ships too quickly, so I’ll wait until it’s closer to the day we fly. My wife is going to use the iPad Mini I bought before this trip (which, yes, is too small).

And then there’s that NAS.

I almost certainly will get a Synology NAS, but I have been experimenting with Ubuntu Linux and Windows Server 2025 specifically to see whether going with a more traditional PC-type server could make sense. I doesn’t, probably. But I want to be open-minded here. I did quickly rule out Windows Server 2025, at least.

Anyway. We fly home Saturday. There’s always so much to do.