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
    2023-07-07T20:21:37+00:00

    I am typing this on my original Surface Pro 3, I even had the RT, and a couple more Surfaces between the family members that I bought, advocated and even converted two Mac users.

    My Surface Pro 3 is still chugging along just fine after 8 years of heavy use.

    I barely even started working on the Surface Pro 8 for a month ( I bought it to retire the SP3 and make it a media server for my hifi. I also thought it is cute to commemorate 8 years of the SP3, with the 8th device, and SP8 has essentially more value adding new features and innovations than previous Surface Pro iterations)

    Microsoft forgot what it takes to build the SP3 and show the world they're still relevant and innovating

    This SP8 has immediately thrown out 8 years of my trust, affinity and confidence in the Surface brand.

    You would have thought buying an in house device for their own OS would have limited these kind of disruptive issues....but their own updates bricked their own device.....

    I guess they will never be able to best Apple Macintoshes

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-06-15T20:06:12+00:00

    Hi Wayne Strydom,

    Thank you for reaching Microsoft Community and apologies for the inconvenience this has caused you.

    Just to make sure: this happens every time you detach the typecover, right? or there are times also that when you detach the typecover, the device is able to detect it and automatically goes to tablet mode? or if you do a re-attach and detach several times, would the device eventually detect it and goes to tablet mode or not at all and you would need to restart the device without the typecover attached for it to go to tablet mode?

    Tablet mode in Windows 11 no longer exists as a specific mode. The device should automatically go to tablet mode whenever the typecover is detached. See: Frequently Asked Questions: Windows 11 - Microsoft Community for more details. Considering that a reinstall of Windows were tried already and still issue persists, this seems to be a hardware issue already on the connectors of the device where it is unable to detect that the typecover is being detach and thus, it does not go to tablet mode, but can you please try these steps below first then let me know how it goes:

    Detach the typecover (device stays in Desktop mode due to the issue)

    Open Device Manager

    Click on Action

    Select Scan for hardware changes

    Check if the device detects that the typecover is detached and goes to tablet mode

    Kind regards,
    Marrion

    Hi Marrion, a number of users are facing this issue. Is there a fix on the way? Seems like this is a pure software/firmware issue.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-06-15T10:33:20+00:00

    Microsoft clearly doesn't care. They sold us all a supposedly premium device at thousands of dollars and it has such a glaring glitch but absolute silence from them.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-05-23T22:35:10+00:00

    Yup. It's likely a completely fixable software issue but they don't care.

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  5. 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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