Surface Pro 9 won't enter tablet mode after disconnecting the type cover

Anonymous
2023-04-02T21:43:46+00:00

So it's been two days of back and forward with customer support and cannot get a resolution on this issue. Bought a brand new Surface Pro 9 and out of the box have had issues with basic functionality. Initially we thought that the auto rotation was janky but eventually discovered that we could boot up the device without keyboard attached and tablet mode worked great, but once we connected the type cover keyboard and then removed it, the device stays in desktop mode. I've reinstalled a fresh version of the OS three times, run all Windows updates, downloaded and installed the Surface Pro 9 drivers from the Microsoft site, done the 20 second power down... none of it makes any difference.

Anyone have any advice? If I can't solve this I will need to return and repurchase etc, which means I may just go elsewhere, this has been a pretty poor user experience and I was pretty excited for this purchase. Hoping to get some help, much appreciated 🙏

Surface | Surface Pro | Display and screen

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-04-18T17:03:38+00:00

    I already tried but there was no improvement.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-04-23T19:46:01+00:00

    So I returned the old one and got a new one.

    Started it, was happy to see it worked fine, updated windows as required an now I'm crying - same problem again 😭

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-04-28T04:46:35+00:00

    So I returned the old one and got a new one.

    Started it, was happy to see it worked fine, updated windows as required an now I'm crying - same problem again 😭

    this is my second sp9. i returned the first one because of faulty hardware and now this.. this is a real joke

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-05-05T14:39:36+00:00

    I have the same issue, though I do not think it is a hardware issue. When I go into device manager when I attach and detach the keyboard, it updates and shows 2 out of the 4 surface HID keyboards going away and coming back. I tried disabling the other two that don't remove, but it still does not update the surface to tablet mode. All my drivers are up to date, so I'm hoping an update comes soon to resolve this. If they were to just bring back the tablet mode button on the task bar would be good enough for me.

    AusAidan's work around works as well, which helps confirm that this is a software issue vs a hardware

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-05-05T22:29:12+00:00

    Just yesterday I bought Surface pro 9, did all the Windows update and everything worked fine.

    Today I wanted to write some notes on it, after disconnecting the keyboard it did not switch to the table mode and did not allow to rotate the screen, not to mention that the on-screen keyboard was not popping up, which was rather annoying.

    I have reached out to Microsoft support, their support agent was really nice and tried all possible things, unfortunately the issue remained. We did one interesting discovery, when the type cover is disconnected I can just connect power adapter and it fixes it for me. Seems like the Surface is not able to properly recognize disconnection of the Type cover keyboard.

    It is a bit disappointing to see that premium device from Microsoft itself is having such glitch.

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