My Gear Setup — What Survived Two Years of Travel

I've replaced four USB-C cables, one power bank, one pair of headphones and a keyboard I loved. I have not replaced the laptop, the charger, or the backup drive.

That ratio is the useful information. Every gear list tells you what someone bought; almost none tell you what was in the bin eight months later. If you want the full inventory and the packing logic, that's in the packing post. This one goes deeper on fewer things.

The laptop

Verdict: buy RAM, not clock speed, and not thinness.

I run Docker, a Postgres container, a Next.js dev server, a React Native metro bundler and thirty Chrome tabs, sometimes together. Every one is a memory consumer, not a CPU consumer. On a 16GB machine I spent two years watching swap thrash and closing things to make room. 32GB is the difference between a laptop that works and a laptop you manage.

The other lesson is against ultra-thin. Thin machines throttle at 34°C ambient, which is most of the year where I live, and they tolerate less abuse from being carried on a scooter daily. Mine has a dent in the lid from a fall and works perfectly. A thinner chassis might not.

Second screen vs laptop stand

Verdict: I bought the portable monitor, I carry the stand.

I bought a 15" USB-C portable display and used it happily for about four months. Then I did the honest accounting: it added roughly 800g, needed its own cable and sometimes its own power, and I only unpacked it when staying somewhere longer than three weeks.

It lives in Hyderabad now. What I carry is a folding aluminium stand that weighs 200g, costs about $25, and fixes the neck problem that was genuinely damaging me. If you can carry exactly one, carry the stand. A raised screen with an external keyboard beats a flat second screen for what it does to your body.

Keyboard and mouse

Verdict: the keyboard died, the mouse won't.

A low-profile 65% mechanical keyboard, now on its second unit. The first died from humidity and, I suspect, from sharing a bag with a slightly damp towel exactly once. Keyboards in the tropics are consumables. Buy a mid-range one you won't mourn rather than a $200 custom build.

The mouse is a small wireless one that has done nothing interesting for two years, which is the highest compliment available.

Headphones

Verdict: over-ear ANC for work, in-ear for everything else, and the sweat problem is real.

Over-ear noise cancelling is not optional if you work in cafés. But in Southeast Asia the earcups get hot within twenty minutes of leaving air conditioning, and the pads absorb sweat. My first pair's pads disintegrated after about fourteen months. Check that pads are replaceable before you buy; mine were, and $20 of pads bought another year.

In-ears with ANC for flights, walking, and any day above 33°C. Two pairs sounds indulgent and weighs 300g combined. It's the right call.

Charging, which is where things actually break

Verdict: one GaN charger replaced four bricks. Cheap cables are the number one thing that dies.

A single 100W GaN multi-port charger runs the laptop, phone, headphones and power bank from one socket. It replaced four bricks and about 600g, and it has never once failed. Get one with at least three ports, enough wattage for your laptop, plus a universal plug adapter.

The cables are the opposite story. I've killed four, all cheap, all at the connector strain point, always the laptop one and always at the worst time. Braided cables from a manufacturer that publishes real power ratings cost three times as much and last five times as long. Cheapest upgrade on this list, and I resisted it for a year out of stubbornness.

Power bank. Check the watt-hour rating before you fly. Airlines generally allow up to 100Wh in carry-on without approval, 100–160Wh with permission, nothing above. That's roughly 27,000mAh at 3.7V. A 30,000mAh bank is over the line and I've watched people surrender them at the gate. Mine is 20,000mAh and 74Wh, printed on the case, which is what security wants to see.

Connectivity

Verdict: eSIM to land, local SIM to live.

An eSIM the moment I land, so I have data in the taxi queue. Then a local SIM within two days, because it's four to eight times cheaper for a month of real data and gives you a local number for Grab, deliveries and the landlord. eSIMs are convenience; local SIMs are infrastructure. The local SIM is also what saves you when the apartment wifi turns out worse than the ten-minute test suggested.

Backup, and the part I got wrong

Verdict: a drive plus cloud, and you must actually test the restore.

A small SSD in the bag, plus continuous cloud backup. For eighteen months I had exactly this and felt responsible about it.

Then I needed a file from four months earlier and found my cloud backup had silently stopped syncing one folder, thanks to an exclusion rule I set during a disk-space panic and forgot. Everything looked green. The data wasn't there.

Now I restore one random file every month. A backup you haven't restored from is a hypothesis.

Heat and humidity

Nobody warned me about this and it's killed more of my gear than drops have. Humidity gets into keyboards and connectors and corrodes them slowly. Heat degrades batteries permanently: a laptop left in a hot room ages faster than one worked harder in air conditioning. Silica packets in the bag, nothing left in direct sun or a parked scooter compartment, and don't charge a laptop on a bed in a room with no aircon.

Theft

Assume it happens. My plan:

• Full-disk encryption, always. FileVault or LUKS. A stolen laptop should be a hardware loss and nothing more.
• Nothing that only exists locally. Everything in git or cloud storage I've verified restores.
• A two-hour recovery plan stored somewhere I can reach from a phone: revoke sessions, rotate SSH keys and API tokens, remote wipe, then the police report the insurer will demand.
• Cards and passport split across two bags in two places.

The last time I ran that exercise I found three API keys in a plaintext .env on the desktop. That's the point of it.

If I could keep one purchase it would be the GaN charger, but the one that changed the most is the $25 folding stand. Two years of neck pain, fixed by a piece of bent aluminium I nearly didn't pack.