Field Notes

Three Months on a Tablet, No Laptop

For ten years, the laptop went everywhere I did. Different laptops — a beat-up MacBook Air, then a Pro, then back to an Air — but always something with a hinge and a fan. Then in January I packed for a long trip and, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I left it on my desk and grabbed only the iPad.

Three months later, I’m writing this on the same iPad, in a café in Da Nang, and I haven’t regretted it once. Not really.

This is the honest version of how it went.

The setup

The whole kit is small enough that it fits in the front pocket of a 35L bag.

• iPad Air (M2, 11-inch)
• Logitech Combo Touch keyboard case
• Apple Pencil (rarely used, but I keep it)
• A 65W Anker GaN charger and one USB-C cable
• AirPods Pro, mostly for flights

That’s it. No mouse, no dongle, no second screen. It weighs about a kilo all in.

What just worked

Most things, honestly. Email, calendar, reading, writing in iA Writer, watching downloaded shows on long bus rides, taking notes during walking days, video calls with family. The iPad is genuinely a great device for 90% of what I do on the road.

A few things were better than on a laptop:

• Battery life. I went a full travel day from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, used it on the bus and at the bus station and in the back of a tuk-tuk, and got to the hotel still at 40%. My old MacBook would have been dead by the airport.
• Dropping it in my bag and going. No “wait, did I put it to sleep?” No worrying about a coffee spill near the keyboard. The Combo Touch is a hard shell. I treated it more like a paperback than a computer.
• Reading mode. Detach the keyboard, hold it in landscape, read for hours. My MacBook never let me lie down on a hostel bunk and read like that.

What I had to work around

A few things broke. None of them stopped me, but each one cost me 20 minutes of frustration the first time it came up.

File management. Files on iPadOS is fine, but it’s not Finder. When a client sent me a zipped folder of photos to caption, I spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to extract it and rename things in batch. There’s a way; it’s just not the way I’d been doing it for a decade.

Some websites. Squarespace’s editor barely works on iPad. Same for a few back-end CMS tools I had to log into. I solved it with the desktop-mode toggle in Safari, which works most of the time. When it didn’t, I emailed the client and asked them to make the change themselves. They always did.

The keyboard. The Combo Touch is the best iPad keyboard I’ve used, but the trackpad is small, and the keys are fine but not great. After three months my hands had adjusted. The first week, I made a lot of typos.

The Bangkok moment

Three weeks in, I had to edit a 40-minute video for a friend. Nothing fancy — cuts, music, captions. I tried LumaFusion. It worked, but rendering took forever, and the export crashed twice. I sat in a café in Bangkok with the iPad plugged in, fan from the espresso machine roaring, and seriously considered walking to MBK and buying a cheap Chromebook just for that one project.

I didn’t. I rendered it overnight, the third try worked, and I sent the file the next morning. But that’s the moment I want to be honest about. The iPad isn’t a laptop. If your job involves video editing, complex spreadsheets, or any kind of dev work, you’ll hit a wall. I just don’t do those things often enough for the wall to matter.

Would I do it again

Yes. The next trip, the laptop is staying home again.

The thing nobody tells you about traveling lighter is that the lightness compounds. A smaller bag means a smaller cab, a faster line at the gate, less to worry about when you leave a café for ten minutes. The iPad isn’t just a smaller computer — it’s a different relationship with the work. I close it more often. I read more. I look up more.

If you’ve been thinking about it: try it for two weeks. If it doesn’t work, the laptop will still be there when you get home.