I'm on my second i5 Surface Pro 3. My first only had 4GB RAM. Now, I'm not one of those programmers who insists he needs 32GB to write Hello World in PHP, but

I'm on my second i5 Surface Pro 3. My first only had 4GB RAM. Now, I'm not one of those programmers who insists he needs 32GB to write Hello World in PHP, but Docker wouldn't start half the time because other apps already secured the RAM they needed and that just wasn't sustainable. This one has 8GB, which is much more comfortable. I use it for web dev (PHP/WordPress, Node.js), video calls, Slack, and all the other things an Engineering Manager ends up doing. After work, I use it for ebooks (Amazon Cloud Reader), Comixology, Flipboard, the New York Times Crossword, occasional gaming (my kid takes up almost all my free time, not that I'm complaining). I feel like the Surface really hits the mark as a capable desktop/laptop I can throw in my bag and go. I picked up a Surface Dock on eBay and it has no problem driving dual monitors. My only disappointment is the thermal throttling, which I hear was fixed in the Surface Pro 4. I tried playing games with registry settings and power profiles, but what's worked best is just a USB fan blowing right where the CPU is. With that in place, it never throttles down when I'm on a video call. But it's such a ridiculous hack. It reminds me of when I had a desk fan blowing over the back of my Commodore 1541 disk drive growing up. It's kind of weird to use it on my lap with the Touch Cover, too. I need to put my feet up to have any kind of stable surface to balance it on. It's a lot easier to stand it up on a table, but I'd much rather lean back. To be honest, though, I don't use it like that very often so I can live with it. I'm kind of tempted by the Brydge keyboard coming out, but not for the price they're asking. Before this, I had a Surface Pro 2. That one was way too thick & heavy, and the 16:9 aspect ratio was weird for the kind of work I do. I think the Surface Pro 3/4 really nail the form factor.