Hey,
It’s Pete Matheson with a new issue of Experiments in Progress.
The dream is working from a beach in Bali.
The reality is a dead laptop, no signal, and a café with one fought-over plug socket.
Nail the tech and the dream actually holds up.
🎒Best Tech for Digital Nomads
So here's the kit I'd actually pack, built around the one thing that matters most on the road: staying powered and connected without thinking about it.
📶 eSIM: get online the second you land
Holafly is the one I keep coming back to.
Here's the honest breakdown:
Unlimited data plans: no counting gigabytes
Built-in VPN on the China plan: Western apps work out of the box
One catch: hotspot/tethering is capped at 500MB per day, so it's a phone-first option, not a laptop lifeline
If you want something cheaper and more flexible per-GB, Saily is the alternative worth a look. But for "install it, land, and forget about it" — Holafly.
💻 Laptop: a MacBook Air is still the answer
If your work survives on battery, the MacBook Air is hard to beat. Apple rates it at 18 hours, and in real-world use it genuinely gets you through a full working day without hunting for a plug.
If you're doing heavy video work all day, step up to the MacBook Pro.
⌚ Watch: Garmin
While most smartwatches are begging for a cable every day or two, a Garmin keeps your health and fitness tracking running for weeks.
The Enduro 3 does up to 36 days in smartwatch mode, or up to 90 days with solar charging. Even the smaller Instinct 3 Solar can effectively run indefinitely with enough sun.
🔋 Power bank: live off the grid for days
A big Anker bank (something like the Anker Prime or the Anker Laptop Power Bank) lets you plug in multiple devices and top them up several times over.
~25,000–27,000mAh — the sweet spot, and still under the 100Wh TSA carry-on limit
Multiple ports — phone, watch, earbuds and tablet all at once
Built-in retractable cables on the Laptop model — fewer cords to lose
Realistically it won't fully recharge your laptop many times but it'll keep your phone, watch and tablet alive for days away from a socket.
📝 E-ink tablet
The reMarkable Paper Pro Move is the travel-friendly pick — it's smaller than a paperback with a 7.3" colour display, and it lasts up to two weeks on a charge (0–90% in about 45 minutes).
It does one thing — distraction-free writing and reading — and does it with battery life your phone could only dream of.
No notifications, no apps, no rabbit holes. On a long-haul flight, that's a feature, not a limitation.
Source: The Verge
✈️ Jet lag: an app that actually works
Timeshifter is the one tool I'd genuinely recommend.
It builds a personalised plan around your flights and chronotype, then pings you when to seek light, when to avoid it, and when to time caffeine and sleep.
A lot of wearables now bake similar guidance in too — Garmin, Whoop and the Fitbit app all have versions of this. And honestly, you can just ask Gemini to talk you through a light/sleep schedule in a pinch.
🖥️ A second screen, without the second screen
Working off a single laptop display in a café gets old fast.
The trick most nomads miss: your iPad doubles as a portable second monitor.
Plug it in (or run it wireless), and you've got a proper two-screen setup that folds into your bag. It's a tablet when you're off the clock and a monitor when you're on it.
🎒 What to actually pack
If your biggest pain is… | Pack this |
|---|---|
Getting online instantly abroad | Holafly eSIM |
All-day battery for real work | |
Never charging your watch | Garmin Enduro 3 / Instinct 3 Solar |
Being far from a plug for days | |
Reading & notes with zero charge anxiety | reMarkable Paper Pro Move |
Surviving time zones | Timeshifter app |
A bigger workspace in a small bag |
📱 Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with a friend who’s as obsessed with tech as you are:
We're halfway through 2026, and a handful of gadgets have genuinely surprised me — the kind of stuff I didn't expect to keep using, but now can't put down.
And with Amazon Prime Day 2026 around the corner, most of it is likely to actually go on sale.
💾 UGREEN NAS (home cloud storage) → Official UK
❄️ TORRAS COOLiFY (portable neck fan) → Amazon
🛏️ Eight Sleep
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