Looking at my old travel photos from 2012 and the gear I used to carry is wild

I was cleaning out a cloud folder and found a picture of my setup in a Chiang Mai cafe. I had a huge laptop, a separate mobile wifi hotspot, and a stack of local SIM cards. Then I read a blog post that said back in 2010, the average weight of a digital nomad's tech bag was over 15 pounds. My current 13-inch laptop and phone do more than all that stuff combined. Has anyone else kept pictures of their old travel setups?

3 comments

3 Comments

knight.xena28d agoTop Commenter

My 2010 backpack had a portable DVD player.

kevin_bailey28d ago

Oh man, that hits home! I found a shot from 2013 where I'm holding a massive external battery pack the size of a brick, just to keep my phone alive for a few extra hours. I totally get what @knight.xena means about the portable DVD player, it's the same vibe. We used to pack all these single-use gadgets that just added bulk. My old camera alone needed its own case and a bunch of cords. It's crazy how sleek everything is now.

xenar1410d ago

Remember lugging around a separate GPS unit for road trips? Mine had a suction cup that always fell off the windshield. It felt so high-tech at the time, but compared to a phone now it was a brick. @knight.xena mentioning the DVD player makes me think of all the cords tangled in my old glove box. We just accepted that tech needed its own heavy bag.