What I Use: Mexico, September to November 2025 ⭐

This is a What I Use for the ages: Lots of travel, lots of new technology, lots of changes all around.

? Travel logistics

As I write this, we’re heading into the last four or five days in Mexico City for this trip, and for all of 2025. This is our third trip to Mexico City this year. We were here from mid-January to early May, a bit over 15 weeks, and by far the longest consecutive period we’ve been outside the U.S. We were here for a month, basically July, though that was supposed to be a two-month-long trip that was cut short when our daughter unexpectedly graduated from college. And now we’ve been here for roughly two months.

But not exactly.

In early September, my wife and I flew to Berlin, Germany for IFA, a five or six day trip. Between then and our mid-September flight to Mexico City, my wife somehow managed to put together the purchase of our condo in Macungie, Pennsylvania, as I discussed in From the Editor’s Desk: Good Decisions, Less Good Decisions ⭐. And after being in Mexico City for about two days, we flew to Maui, Hawaii for the Snapdragon Summit 2025, probably for five or six days. Since then, we’ve pretty much stayed in Mexico City, though we did go away for a long weekend to Oaxaca, which is only an hour by air. But we had 2 to 2.5 hour delays on both flights, which was terrific.

I’m not pedantic enough to take a completely accurate count, but by the time 2025 comes to a close, we will have spent more time outside the U.S. than in our home country. I guess it’s about 7 months. Most of that was spent in Mexico, and most of that was spent in Mexico City.

There’s no perfect schedule for us. But we like being home in Pennsylvania for the holidays, meaning Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, during which we see our kids, our families, and our friends. And we like being in Mexico during the winter, of course, and so we’ll be back in Mexico by mid-January. We haven’t booked that trip, but I imagine it will be similar to this year’s first trip. Minimizing the flights is definitely a goal.

Anyway. We’re looking forward to getting back to Pennsylvania.

? Pre-trip

I mostly have duplicates of everything I need, from computers and other tech to clothes and whatever else, in both homes, which makes traveling back and forth a lot easier. But I brought 6 polo shirts with me to Mexico to replace the ones I had there, and I always travel with two long sleeve shirts and one or two short sleeve shirts because I can’t buy the shirts I like anymore and I’ve never found suitable replacements. I need to work on that but I hate shopping, especially for clothes.

From a tech front, there were a few developments. The biggest being that I brought the first NAS here. This was entertaining but curiously didn’t trigger any additional security checks in Philadelphia or Mexico City, despite it being in my carry-on luggage and that bag getting scanned in both locations.

I also came to Mexico with a Google Pixelsnap Ring Stand, which I will leave in Mexico as I have something similar at home, and a pair of Pixel Buds Pro 2 earbuds. I also brought an Anker MagGo Power Bank that supports Qi 2/15 watts, which I will likely keep in Mexico since we typically need that type of thing there when we’re out taking photos all day. I wrote about these and other MagSafe/Qi 2/Pixelsnap accessories in Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: The Magic of Pixelsnap ⭐.

Before we left, I purchased an inexpensive USB-based DVD drive because I noticed some optical discs in storage and can’t find the one optical drive I used to have. These things are pretty much unnecessary for most people now, but I want to make sure there’s nothing on those discs before I destroy them. I also got an HP Thunderbolt 180W G6 Dock in for review, but it arrived just before we left. I wrote up a first impressions article, but I didn’t publish it yet and probably will do so soon. I’ll be using it daily once we get back.

? Kelly totals another car

Despite being just 24, our daughter Kelly has somehow managed to get in four pretty bad accidents, three of which resulted in her totaling her car (meaning the cost of repairing it was greater than the value of the vehicle). Amazingly, two of those accidents involved one car, the 2007 Mercedes C280 that I purchased from my father in 2007 and drove cross-country to get it back to Massachusetts. I gave the car to Kelly when she got her driver’s license in 2019, at which point we were in Pennsylvania.

When she totaled it the first time, Ali, a mechanic friend who I wrote about in From the Editor’s Desk: This is What Matters Most (Premium) repaired it and we were able to put it back on the road using a salvage (“S”) title that is unique to Pennsylvania. But then she went off to college and totaled it again in North Carolina. So Ali found her an excellent used Honda Civic, which we handed off to her during a 2023 trip to Washington D.C. in which both kids flew there to join us. So she drove that car back to North Carolina. And then totaled it in October. While we were in Mexico. Because seriously.

As Kelly describes it, she did nothing wrong. But even her version of the story made my wife and I think she was at fault, and she was. So we have that insurance cost increase to look forward to. But shorter term, we had to help her figure out a new (to her) car or, as I think of it, her next victim. We weren’t sure how this would go, and we looked at various options that included one or both of us going to North Carolina for a week or whatever to look at cars and help her figure that out. We got $10,000 for her wrecked car, so that was the budget. (Or, as I think of it, the next $10,000 we can flush down the toilet.)

In the end, I re-subscribed to Consumer Reports so we could view their used car data, Kelly located a few national-scale car resellers, found several options, and then paid a mechanic to come and evaluate one of those cars. And after a wire transfer and a bit of handwringing, she bought a 2012 Toyota RAV4. And then upgraded it with a CarPlay and Android Auto-compatible screen that’s the type of thing I want for our own car of a similar age.

Since I’m on this topic, I will say that Kelly’s other, non-totaling accident is also an Ali story. In that case, a kid who had just received his license that day, literally, rear-ended Kelly in our car (also literally while hers was in the shop from being totaled) in his mom’s enormous Porsche SUV. We agreed not to go through insurance if she paid for the damages, but when Ali delivered the estimate to her, which was way under the normal cost, she tried to delay paying or not paying at all. So we told her we were calling the insurance company if she didn’t pay immediately. So she finally paid Ali, bitching and moaning about the unfairness of life, as he would make the repairs. But he played a nice role in getting her to finally pay up, suggesting that she could pay him with a credit card, which she did. And since the damage was just cosmetic, we never did do the repairs, and Ali just gave us the cash. Screw that entitled woman and her son.

? Mexican phone numbers

We finally got local Mexico phone numbers with normal cellular accounts on this trip after trying and failing a few times in the past: We have residency now, with an ID, and that’s what put it over the top. We both got Lite 2 cellular accounts at AT&T Mexico with unlimited calls and texts and 20 GB of 5G data for about $20 USD per month (each), which seems reasonable, but is even more so because that data will work in the U.S. too.

And that presents an interesting problem/opportunity: For the past three or four months, I’ve been paying about $72 per month including taxes for Google Fi Unlimited Premium. This includes 100 GB of high-speed data, 50 GB of high-speed tethering, data in Canada and Mexico, data eSIM access for other devices, and free connectivity for my Pixel Watch 3. But that’s a lot of money and now that we have more than enough data for each month, in the U.S. and in Mexico, I can (and most likely will) drop Fi after we get home to save some money.

More on this below.

? Mercado Libre, Mercado Pago, and a surprisingly useful debit card

Related to the above, we still don’t have Mexican bank accounts. But Stephanie discovered that we could create accounts with Mercado Libre, a sort of Latin American Amazon.com alternative that’s popular here, and then use that account to get an account at Mercado Pago, its electronic payments service. Among other things, Mercado Pago sends you a debit card that you can fill locally or electronically and then use it for payments in restaurants, stores, and wherever else credit cards and debit cards are used. So this is a nice interim step.

?️ Amazon Prime

I used Amazon Mexico so much on this and the previous trip that I subscribed to Amazon Prime in Mexico, too. You can do this on the same email address as the one you use with Prime in the U.S., which is convenient. And no, you can’t use a U.S. Prime account in Mexico. But it’s cheap, like $5 per month USD, and you get big discounts on purchases, and those discounts have more than covered over a year of the service already. And yes, it has same-day and next-day shipping on many items, as in the U.S. So many of the new items noted below came via Amazon Mexico.

?‍? Tech acquisitions

Since we arrived in Mexico, I purchased several new tech-related items after several trips of not needing to do so.

? Selfie stick/tripod

I had a small phone tripod in Mexico already, but it was weak enough that the weight of a big phone was enough to cause it to slide down to the base slowly over time. So I finally got a solid ULANZI selfie stick/tripod with MagSafe, since all the phones I use now and will use in the future support this excellent feature. It costs about $40 ($33 in the U.S.), and I use it daily with a Pixel 10 at my home office setup on the table between the kitchen and the living room, so I can use the phone as a webcam.

? Xbox Wireless Controller

I play games on Windows 11-based laptops now since even mainstream PCs are quite serviceable for this usage. And so I have an Xbox Wireless Controller at home in PA an one here in Mexico City. But sometime in early October, the controller in Mexico started exhibiting some major issues: In Call of Duty, my in-game player would always move forward, even when I intended to remain still, and nothing I could do would fix it.

Electronics are typically more expensive in Mexico than in the U.S., often much more. And that proved to be the case with an Xbox Wireless Controller at the time mine failed. I ended up getting a very red Pulse Cypher Special Edition controller for about $85 USD not because I like the color, I really don’t, but only because it was the cheapest option at the time. Ugh.

Oddly, looking at controllers as I write this, I can see that a normal white or black controller is now priced lower (about $69 USD), and closer to the typical U.S. price. Ah well.

? Google TV Streamer

The Google TV Streamer is normally $99.99, but it was on sale for about $75 in October, so I checked Amazon Mexico and found that I could get it here for about $90 USD, which is a similar discount over the normal price in Mexico. I wrote about this device in Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: Google on the TV ⭐, and though I will likely stick with Apple TV 4K for the television normally, it’s quite nice, and I will be doing some smart home experimentation and usage regardless.

? Laptop SSD success

I bought a Snapdragon X-based HP OmniBook 5 16-inch laptop over the summer and specifically went with the lowest-priced model, so it came with just 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage. Despite its low-end specs, this is one of the best laptops I’ve ever used, so much so that I had a hard time tearing myself away from it despite having other laptops to review. The 16 GB of RAM has proven to be fine in day-to-day use, but the 256 GB of storage was problematic. So I purchased a 1 TB Crucial SSD and an SSD enclosure from Amazon Mexico (total cost about $103 USD), cloned the internal SSD to the new SSD, and then swapped them out. This is all documented in Operation SSD Swap is a Success ⭐, but now I have a terrific Windows 11 on Arm/Snapdragon X laptop that I will leave in Mexico.

?️ Desktop monitor fail

Lenovo sent me the Snapdragon X-based ThinkCentre neo 50q QC to review in mid-October, and I was excited to get started with this small form factor (SFF) PC. But as I quickly discovered, it only has a single USB-C port and it’s oddly not compatible with DisplayPort, so I can’t use it with the USB-C-based portable displays I use in Mexico. I ordered a USB-C to HDMI cable from Amazon Mexico to solve that problem, but this cable is one-way, so I can’t go from HDMI to USB-C. And so I finally ordered a 24-inch Full-HD Acer SA242Y desktop display for about $90 USD, also from Amazon Mexico.

It doesn’t work. The monitor wouldn’t power on and so I couldn’t use it with the ThinkCentre neo 50q QC. Fantastic.

In the good news department, returns are as simple and customer-friendly in Mexico as they are in the U.S., though I had to go to a printing business down the street to print the shipping label.

I borrowed the desktop display my wife uses in Mexico a few times so I could complete the configuration, install updates, and get a bit of experience with the PC. But it’s not enough for a review, and with time running out on this trip, I decided that I will fly back to the U.S. with it in my carry-on. More on that below, but I really do need to get a desktop display for Mexico. That’s for the next trip, I guess.

? Come with, stay here, go home

I have several laptops that I leave in Mexico, though I have many, many more, dozens really, in PA. When we flew here, I brought my MacBook Air, which I barely touched, plus the HP EliteBook 6 I just reviewed and the HP OmniBook 5 16-inch laptop I purchased in mid-summer and reviewed about a month ago. I will be leaving the OmniBook 5 here so I have a good Snapdragon X-based laptop in Mexico. (My Surface Laptop 7, which I also love, is waiting for me back in PA.)

On a related note, I wasn’t sure what to expect with review devices on this trip since both HP and Lenovo had issues shipping laptops here back in the spring. HP wasn’t willing to risk it, but Lenovo did, and the two PCs it shipped to me here, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 gaming handheld and the Lenovo ThinkCentre neo 50q QC, both arrived without issue or drama.

My Legion Go 2 review is almost done, so that should appear any day now. But as noted, I will bring the neo 50q home to PA with me, use it and review it there, and then I’ll just ship it back to Lenovo from there. Then, when we get back to Mexico in January, I will ship them back the empty box that it came in. Silly, yes. But given the timing, it’s the best I can do.

➕ A few home items

And then there were a few non-tech items that may or may not be of interest. Among the more notable …

? Portable lights

When we were in Washington D.C. in early August—we spent a few days there after our daughter’s college graduation—I saw a neat little light at a bar that had a nice warm color and a USB-C port for charging. So I used Gemini on my phone to find out what it was, ordered two of them from Amazon, and we have them now in our condo in Pennsylvania. But they’re even nicer than I realized, as they support three different light color/warmth settings and you can hold down on the touch control ring that changes those colors to adjust the brightness up and down too. So we ordered three of them for our apartment in Roma Norte from Amazon Mexico, too. They’re about $30 a piece on Amazon Mexico.

? Eyeglasses repair kit

Before we went to Mexico in mid-September, my wife and I ordered new glasses from Warby Parker, but they were delayed and arrived after we traveled, so we won’t see them until late November when we head back. My glasses are particularly old and I should have replaced them years ago, but they also work well enough, so that fed my procrastination tendencies.

But sometime in October, I was reading in bed one night and a lens popped out because a tiny screw had come undone. This has happened a few times over the years, and I’ve never had issues screwing it back together. But I didn’t have my eyeglasses repair kit in Mexico for some reason, so I ordered a rather involved kit with many, many pieces for about $15. And then I ended up taking the glasses apart completely to clean everything and replace the screws and nose pieces with replacement parts from the kit, because why not. If the new Warby Parker glasses work out, though, I will order a second pair to make sure I have an up-to-date backup.

?️ Sunglasses

Mexico City is very bright most days and my eyes are sensitive to light thanks to a physical defect, so having sunglasses ready to go is important. I have been buying inexpensive Ray Ban knockoffs from Amazon for many years, and though the prices have steadily crept up, they’re still a pretty good deal, and I now have at least three pairs in Mexico just in case. They’re about $15 each USD, but at one point, I could get three pairs (each with slightly different lens colors) for about $12, if you can believe that. But I do really like them, and they come with a nice carrying case.

? More changes to come

Now that we’re heading back to the U.S. and should be there for almost two months, I will be making several other changes to the personal technology I use regularly and will write about most of these separately as they happen.

Wireless carrier. Thanks to our new AT&T Mexico cellular accounts, I don’t really need Google Fi anymore. So I will likely switch back to Mint Mobile when we get to the States, bringing my (U.S.-based) phone number there with me. I will probably get the 15 GB/12 month plan, which costs $240 ($20 per month). More on this when it happens.

Next iPhone. I wasn’t sure which iPhone 17 series to get or even whether to bother. I’ve gone back and forth on this a lot, as I am more interested in the iPhone Air than I should be. But a few key defects—the single rear camera lens, most obviously, but also the single earpiece-based speaker, the lack of pro camera features, the slower MagSafe and wired charging, and the USB 2.0 port—make it a tough sell. And the base iPhone 17 display is just too small. With no iPhone 17 Plus option, I’ve fallen into my standard annual upgrade pattern and ordered a deep blue iPhone 17 Pro Max with 256 GB of storage for $529 after my $670 iPhone 16 Pro Max trade-in. I also grabbed a deep blue Bare Naked case from Bare Cases for $40 after a discount and shipping. (I have since written about this in Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max Preview.)

Next Pixel. I will be returning the Pixel 10, 10 Pro, and 10 Pro Max review units to Google sometime during our time in the U.S. and so I need to get a new Pixel of my own. I have a bit over $600 in credit at the Google Store from trading in my Pixel 9 Pro XL, and I can get another $400 on trade for my Samsung Galaxy S25+. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is normally $1800, but it was recently on sale for $300 off, or $1500, with that offer ending November 9. And so the final cost to me was about $585 once you factored in taxes, and I have enough in my PayPal account to pay that up front, so this one is completely covered. The timing isn’t ideal, as we fly home on November 21, and this would arrive the week before. But I went for it, so I have a moonstone Pixel 10 Pro Fold 256 GB on the way. I still need to figure out a case, but I suppose a Google Pixelsnap Case for Pixel 10 Pro Fold will do the trick at least temporarily. (I since wrote about this in Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Preview.)

Smart home. I am quite excited about the new IKEA smart home products and plan to buy into this ecosystem (meaning Matter, really) as soon as possible. The issue will be timing, since it’s not clear when these products will become available in both the U.S. and Mexico. But all the new products are inexpensive and many look quite useful. I have my eye on lights, smart plugs, door/window sensors, the air quality sensor, and, most importantly, the water leakage sensor, as we’ll need some for both homes. I will also get an IKEA smart home hub or perhaps a second Google TV Streamer for PA since that can act as a Matter hub too.

Slightly smarter car. Our car is getting pretty old, and the most advanced technology in it is Bluetooth, and that barely works. I almost purchased an add-on CarPlay/Android Auto screen for the car during the 1.5 months were sort of back in PA in August/September, but couldn’t figure out which one to get. So I was amused to see that our daughter got one for her “new” car, which is a year older than he previous vehicle (above). I had replaced the stereo in that car with an in-dash unit, but what she has now is similar to what I was thinking about for us. Maybe this will finally happen while we’re back.