Microsoft offering refunds for Surface Pro 3 battery warranty charges

After several complaints about Surface Pro 3 battery issues, with the most recent one being acknowledged seven weeks after its filing, Microsoft is rolling out a new firmware upgrade which fixes all issues and ends all Surface Pro 3 battery problems, at least for now.

The now denounced Surface tablet, which has been a persistent source of displeasure, is subject to extremely rapid battery drain. So much so that it goes from full to nothing in less than an hour and a half. The battery problems with the Surface Pro 3 started way back in August and ranged from poor battery life to not being charged at all.

This has been the second most significant issue with Surace Pro batteries that emerged this year. The first one affected some devices shipped with batteries manufactured by Simplo, while the current one being attributed to LGC batteries. Though Microsoft never mentioned the names themselves, it did admit a simple firmware bug led sensors to report and display erratic battery charge and capacity.

Although Microsoft was prompt in releasing a fix hardly a month later, users again started experiencing similar, and sometimes even worse, battery behavior. To top it off, even previously unaffected batteries now joined the defective range. Microsoft initially refused to accept the issue, which led some users paying up to $450 in out of warranty replacement charges.

When battery problems first originated with Surface Pro 3, there was speculation that Microsoft purposely triggered the issue, considering that it started happening right after the warranty period for the Surface Pro 3 expired. To subdue these theories, Microsoft offered a refund to the device owners who already paid for an out-of-warranty exchange for the device. Now that a wave of complaints has risen again, Microsoft, after initially denying the issue, has finally started the refunding process again and claims they have contacted the owners privately as well. Surface Pro owners who are still waiting to receive an email regarding the matter should contact Microsoft Support here to claim their refund.

“We’ve gathered additional details about which customers were affected and are committed to making sure that the people who experienced this issue are taken care of,” the company said. “We have reached out to those customers and all refunds were processed in October 2016.”