In case if someone is looking for a good laptop that can deliver good portability then I would definitely recommend the Apple MacBook Air, its light-weight design is perfect to work smoothly on the go. However, I’m currently using the one with 4GB RAM which quite lags sometime so I would recommend the newer 2016 model with 8GB RAM.

I also brought the Nexus 7 with me on my travels but found I didn’t really need it much.

If anything I would have brought my computer the surface pro instead which is a hybrid between a powerful laptop and a tablet and provides the portability without sacrificing too much power.

Yep, I didn’t go into every permutation in detail, as the post was already nearing 2000 words and I don’t think Matt wanted a novel. I’ll be covering backups, and pretty much everything else related to security, in my next post, but in brief, it’s definitely possible to back up photos from your main camera to a phone if it’s got enough storage (either natively or via a microSD card).

Regarding blogging — well, much like I said regarding photography earlier, it’s hard to know where to draw the line with what’s “working” and therefore justifying carrying a laptop, and what’s not. If it’s your income source while you travel, you will almost certainly want a laptop to do it with. If it’s more of a hobby or way of updating the family back home, it’s harder to justify carrying a laptop just for that reason. Netbooks used to be a reasonable compromise, but nobody is really making them any more — something like the Asus Transformer I mentioned would be the alternative now.

At the end of the day, it’s entirely up to you what combination of gear you carry. As long as you’ve thought about your needs in detail, and carry equipment that meets those needs without being total overkill, you’ll likely be happy with it.

As far as insurance goes, it’s not uncommon to have a per-item limit of a few hundred dollars unless you pay extra to specify the more expensive items. That’s got little to do with medical or other emergency cover — they’re different things.

First at laptops: what you don’t mention is blogging and you only briefly touched backups . When traveling the world I found that typing blogs on my ipodtouch was quite tedious. So picked up a netbook for +/-200€ and typing blogs became a dream. @backups: I came upon so many people who lost their photos due to shabby Internet cafe’s or no backups at all. A tablet is the minimum to do it well.

Then travel insurance. Of course this differs per country, but if you have such shitty insurance that they only cover 500$ I can’t help wonder if they cover immergency extraction or search and rescue operations.

So just spend the money on the tablet or get a tin and light laptop.