Panos Panay himself took to the official Windows Devices blog to let everyone know that they were releasing firmware to finally resolve power and sleep related issues with the companies four month old Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book devices.
The issues, ranging from failure of the devices to properly enter and remain in sleep mode plus randomly waking up while in bags to run at full power while closed, have plagued the latest hardware in Microsoft's Surface line since they arrived last fall.
There have been a couple of previous firmware released for the devices that many users had hoped would resolve these issues but it appears that yesterday's updates have finally provided the much sought after solution.
I have been watching social media about this issue and these problems resulted in many users returning their devices due to the frustration they were causing and the lack of a timely resolution.
Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book are not inexpensive devices and they were snapped up initially by people who are early adopters which is to be expected. However, when those early adopters reach a level of dissatisfaction and loss of patience that results in them returning the device because of things like this power problem persisting then that is a real loss on the part of Microsoft.
Panos states that they are seeing and hearing the feedback everyday and that it does eventually make it into the product:
Building devices people love is what drives our team. It’s why we come in to work every morning and it’s what keeps us up at night. And feedback from our customers is really important to the team and to me personally. I read the blogs, I read the comments, I read social media, I read the forums…and so does the team. We love the energy. We’re listening and channeling that feedback directly into our products. Today we’re releasing an update to continue to address that feedback.
The last four months must have been a deafening roar when it comes to the feedback about these power issues.
Initial reports from social media indicate that these firmware updates are indeed solving the sleep and power issues on Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book for users so that is at least a good start and may allow the hardware to begin moving forward past this rough first stage of these devices existence.
These firmware fixes are available in Windows Update.
