From the Editor’s Desk: Interstitial (Premium)

We split our time between Mexico and the U.S., but I feel like I spend as much time traveling between the two as I do in either place. Part of that is just the stress inherent to travel, and how no two trips are the same, even when they're almost identical on paper.

Case in point. This trip: We flew to Mexico yesterday. And though it was mostly the same, it was also mostly different.
? Plans change
The week before we leave for Mexico is always hectic, but this trip was further complicated by my daughter last week when she unexpectedly passed the final class she needed to graduate from college, meaning we suddenly need to be in North Carolina in early August for the graduation. (This was unexpected to me because no one told me that she had retaken the class during the summer semester; I had expected this to happen in the fall.) We had booked this trip for July 8 through August 28, or about 7 weeks, so we could be back in Pennsylvania for the Labor Day weekend.

Well, that's all screwed up. The most likely outcome here is that we just fly home a few days before the graduation and then stay in PA until the next time we go to Mexico (most likely late September through late November). But there's a small possibility that we'll fly to/from North Carolina from here.
? What I brought
That's a problem for another day, but it did impact what I brought with me here, mostly in a good way. I like to travel light, and thanks to us keeping clothes and anything else we need in the apartment in Mexico City, that means I can travel even lighter than usual. Except, of course, that I also had to bring the next set of review laptops with me. I had raced to finish up my oldest pending laptop reviews before we left--I published three reviews over the long weekend before the trip--and so that narrowed the field nicely. But because we are almost certainly coming back to PA earlier than originally planned, it also meant I could lighten the load a bit. So I came here with the next two review laptops instead of three or four.

I also brought my MacBook Air, mostly because I'm using the latest '26 betas across my iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TVs and want to keep up on that while exploring SwiftUI. And it's quite thin.

I can fit four laptops in my HP Renew backpack, along with my phones, charging cables, Beats Studio Pro headphones, passports, and so on. And all I needed in my luggage was a few dress shirts, one pair of shorts, a few pairs of socks, and a small toiletry bag. Which was good, because it left room for me to bring some more electronics, which is always a pain:

A 15-inch USB-C display that I've wanted to bring for quite some time
A pair of Viture XR glasses that Stephen Rose lent me (more on that soon)
A Nixive MagGrip Mini Tripod Pro that I had purchased to replace a cheap mini-tripod I had in Mexico
Various CPAP supplies
Several CAT-8 Ethernet cables (I will be writing about this soon as well)
Other...