This is my work station area at Stardock when I'm working in the Object Desktop area of the company which is located on the third floor of the building.
As you can see, I have 3 monitors connected to a Surface Pro. The reason I'm up here is so that I can collaborate in person with the rest of my team. And the reason for the Surface Pro is that I frequently use it as a tablet for sketching on screenshots and designs.
The only downside is that the Surface Pro 7, while quite powerful, isn't really intended as a full-on development box. It is more than powerful enough to run Office and tweak things in Adobe Photoshop and I've even edited videos in Premiere with it. Even After Effects runs pretty decently. But it's still no where near as fast as my main machine at Stardock which is physically located on the first floor.
At some point, Microsoft's Remote Desktop got really good at handling a multi-monitor setup. It's had this capability for years but for some reason, I always remembered it as being a pretty crappy experience. Recently, however, I decided to give it a shot and when combined with our internal fast network and the Surface Pro's high performance along with the crazy fast performance of my main machine I ended up with a solution that runs faster than if I were running the Surface Pro directly.
As a result, when I'm doing serious work at Stardock, I simply connect with Remote Desktop. I haven't tried doing this from over a VPN yet (so no Coffee Shop test). But even if it didn't make the cut when running via the Internet, the SP7 is more than capable enough to do all the work I could possibly need when using it cut-off from our network.
Which brings me to the Surface Pro 7. While some of my friends in the tech community love their Surface Pro X's, I find that there just aren't enough ARM64 native apps yet to justify using it. To be sure, the Surface Pro X is still more than enough for doing a lot of productivity work -- Jira, Visual Studio Code, MS Teams, Office and such. But I wouldn't dream of doing any heavy lifting with it.
That's where the Remote Desktop pairing might really let the SPX shine. First, there is a native Arm64 version of Remote Desktop. Second, the Surface Pro X is substantially faster in video performance than the Surface Pro 7 which means it may drive my 3 high resolution monitors better (I do wish they had Thunderbolt 3 support however).
As a result, whether I'm at home or work (my home gaming PC is a monster) the SPX would be able to use Remote Desktop to let me get real work done while still being powerful enough to get work done even when not connected to the network (which is why a Chromebook doesn't make the cut).
I won't claim that this use-case isn't a niche use. But it takes the Surface Pro X from being, for me, completely useless to having a pretty viable use-case.
