Post-Post-PC Anxiety

iPad-only? Maybe?

A week into 2016, I find myself falling back into my old computing habits. Each day, as I head out, I make sure to have a laptop, a phone, and a tablet with me. Sometimes two tablets. Occasionally three. Sometimes two phones. Why? I don’t know.

Having just returned from three weeks traveling far, far away, I now find myself thinking about such habits. As previously noted, I traveled light tech-wise (for me). An iPhone, a MacBook, and an iPad (Air 2).¹ Believe me, it took incredible will-power not to bring the brand-new iPad Pro on the trip. And, truth be told, I did kind of miss it. But I also found an odd sort of zen in not having to choose between so many devices each and every day.

In fact, my biggest takeaway (tech-wise) from the trip may have been just how little I used the MacBook. I brought it more or less “just in case” — because, how can you possibly travel for three weeks without an actual computer? Well, turns out you can. Turns out, your tablet and even your phone are computers. And turns out you can almost for sure do everything you need to on those devices.

On paper, I knew all of this, of course. But it’s quite different to live it.

I turned on my laptop to do a Hangout (which I could have done on the iPad or iPhone) on roughly day five of the trip and then I don’t think I used it again beyond a couple minutes to edit the layout of one image in a Medium post (the last thing you have to do on the web). This meant I was down to using two devices on a regular basis on the trip. It was great.

It may have helped that I wasn’t doing any email.² But I had my trusty external keyboard to use with my iPad for writing. So I could have done email. In fact, what am I saying — I already do the vast majority of my email on an iPad these days.

So this leads me back to my bag of gadgets I carry around on a daily basis. It has always been sort of insane, but now I’m the one who can actually see it. So the past few mornings when I’ve gone to put the MacBook in my bag, I’ve stopped for a second: why do I need this thing again?

I don’t. I know that now, having just lived it. But I feel like I’ve been down this road before. And yet that laptop still finds its way into my bag…

Maybe I’ll try to leave it at home tomorrow. But it’s funny: even just thinking about it right now makes me panic a little. What if I need a laptop for something tomorrow? I can’t come up with what such an extraordinary situation would be. But you never know, right? Right?!

Okay. Deep breaths. You can do this. Tomorrow. Just remember the trip. Three weeks! You don’t need it. It’s a mental crutch. It’s holding you back. And, worse comes to worst, you can always run home and get it!

But you won’t need to!

Hopefully.

¹ Okay, yes, and a Kindle. But in our current world, that almost doesn’t even feel like tech. It feels like the health food equivalent of tech.

² Not doing email always helps with everything, I find.