Surface Pro 4 - Screen won't wake from sleep

Ugh, this ticks me off. How do you expect to compete with Apple when a typical Apple customer who was turned off by Microsoft years ago is going to see that and say, "yup, same old Microsoft". Or worse, us sticking with them have to deal with this stuff. They really need to get that Insider Program for Hardware going. Funny thing is, I LOVED my Surface 2...and I love this device minus the Never Able To Sleep issue, and battery life.

Well, they have the "silent" part down, but I'm not so sure about the recall.

My guess is that your store has seen enough of this problem that they know not to try the usual debugging run-around. My Costco currently has a returned SP4 with the wake after sleep issue as their demo unit (still has the little yellow return sticker on it) so it's never in demoable state, which I think they use as a silent "stop sales" order.

Also, it sounds like some of the replacement units getting sent out still have the sleep issue, so if you don't have a store nearby, having to do a mail-order exchange 2-3 times is just not acceptable.

I don't think there is a silent recall.  Perhaps they just don't want someone in the store for an extended period complaining about issues with their flagship product.  I tried to get mine replaced via phone-tech support just a few days ago.  First they had me add and remove a driver and said that would fix the issue. When I called back because it hadn't, they wanted me to switch to hibernate, when I told them that is not what the unit was advertised as requiring for normal work, they said, after the second call, they could only do a standard exchange which means no device for a few weeks - no possibility of an advanced exchange at least in Canada I was told eventually by a supervisor.  So maybe the silent recall is only in your country or via the brick-and-mortar route - which for me would be a 5 hour drive and even then not a guaranteed replacement situation.  I would think that for a silent recall by such a large company they would be bending over backwards to ensure the customer has a good experience.  Take for example the power cord recall - they send you a new one and you throw the old piece of junk away -  they don't ask you to stay with the existing item and just don't bend it and if you do maybe put some duct tape on the end so it bends less....  That is what they are doing with the SP4.  They are basically saying don't use it as advertised, instead apply some duct tape and if that is not good enough then you've proved that a sucker is born every minute.  I'm living proof, I own and SP4, SP3 and Surface Book (which has the same problem as the SP4 with sleep).  Will I buy an SP5 or SB2?  No, I've now decided that although the form factor of the SP series is great and I love the machine when it works, I'm going to go with Dell or Lenovo next time.  MS doesn't really care since they probably make more money off of the windows license fees to OEMs then they make from the surface and perhaps that might explain their lack of support and lack of response to their customers in this situation.  The irony is that the reason I bought the SP4 was because I believed it would at least work as well as my SP3 (which took almost a year for MS to solve the issue of rebooting with the type cover folded fully back).  I also wanted my SP3 to have more RAM and the SP4 could take 16GB - because I like to put a lot into VM for certain java development scenarios.  Since day 1 it hasn't worked as well as my SP3.

But the device manufacturer (or the company whose logo appears on the device) _IS_ standing by the device - they have a silent recall in place (I know - it's only my pet theory, but many signs are pointing there). I don't believe it's a coincidence that when I showed up at the Microsoft store complaining about the sleep issue, they didn't put up much of a fight and gave me a replacement - and also complied when I demanded a certain lot number or higher.

I don't think Microsoft has definitively identified the root cause, but they know that empirically a population of their devices has this issue. It also doesn't seem to be a black and white issue - it's more of a "spectrum" issue (where some devices have less probability of it occurring and some devices always crashes in sleep, etc.).

• Peter