One of the things that made this month’s trip to Japan even more enjoyable was the weak Yen.
Everything was significantly cheaper than on our last visit, back in March. It made food and drink laughably cheap and meant I could pick up a few gifts for family, as well as some clothes, without any guilt.
And even though I wasn’t planning on it at all (honest), I also ended up upgrading my laptop while I was in Tokyo. The combination of tax-free shopping plus the favourable exchange rate meant I saved £400 on a new Macbook Air.
Though I didn’t get it from the Apple Store.
They’ve stopped offering tax-free shopping to visitors, so I ended up going to the much less chic, but much cheaper Yodabashi Camera in Shinjuku. Where the Apple Store is sleek, minimalist and calm, Yodobashi Camera is an overwhelming tsunami of noise and signage that can be quite the assault on the senses.
There, an extremely helpful sales assistant helped me find the right model (with a US keyboard, no UK keyboards were on sale) and I also picked up an iPad Mini for my other half. Combined, they were still cheaper than a single Macbook Air in the UK.
I didn’t even unbox my laptop until the day before flying home, as I was too busy going out and having fun (!!!) but with a couple of days use under my belt, I really like it.
Gone is the annoying touchbar at the top of the keyboard, replaced with real live function keys! The screen is bigger and it’s much, much lighter. And with an M2 chip, it feels quite a lot faster than my MacBook Pro - which has been reset and is now on eBay, waiting to go to a new home.
