Best travel gadgets

Make your next trip more enjoyable with this tested tech gear.

Whenever we go on a family trip, I’m usually the one in charge of the tech — which usually means a ton of charging bricks and cables for our family of six.

In fact, when we went to Mexico City a couple of years ago, an incredulous customs inspector took a look inside my carry-on and remarked, “Muchos electrónicos!” — a phrase my wife continues to tease me with to this day.

But since those days, travel gadgets have gotten much better. Whereas before you likely had to carry separate chargers for your iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple Watch, headphones, battery packs, toothbrush and more, you can likely find one charging device to juice all these — and maybe even simultaneously.

As the summer travel season gets into full swing, we have a roundup of the best travel gadgets you should take a look at before boarding your flight. We even include some stuff you might not immediately think of, like cool new portable monitors and super-handy audio adapters.

Also in today’s newsletter:

  • Apple’s next-gen Siri is apparently so hopeless that the company is looking to outsource it. Oy vey.

  • I often commute to work on an electric scooter here in San Francisco, but it struggles with the hills. Not a problem for this new Navee scooter, which plays well with iPhone and has plenty of oomph for a reasonable price. See our hands-on review, where it earns a rare five stars.

  • Some feared Apple would neglect Pixelmator Pro after its acquisition, but the beloved image-editing software just got a pretty robust update.

  • OWC just released an interesting new SSD that can add terabytes of hardware-encrypted external storage and has a built-in color touchscreen for authentication. Looks perfect for you-know-what!

  • Amazon’s big annual sale, Prime Day, is just around the corner, but the retail giant just launched its first big sale on the new M4 iPad Pros, which in some cases are seeing nearly $400 off.

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

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Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.

— Steve Jobs, 2011.

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