back to article Recall: Bring out yer dead and over-heating Microsoft Surface Pro power cords

Microsoft is initiating a global voluntary recall of Surface Pro power cords amid concerns of over-heating. According to sources in Microsoft's Authorized Device Reseller (ADR) channel, Pro machines built before 15 July last year will qualify to be swapped out as part of an exchange program. A spokesman at Microsoft sent us a …

  1. Only me!

    Bit late!

    My power cord failed after 3 weeks.....the secret I have since discovered is to unplug the power cord from the power pack.

    It's a pity as the power pack is small and light, let down by a cheap cord form the pack to the plug.

  2. Jan 0 Silver badge

    Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

    > Tim Coulling, senior analyst at Canalys, said that it is a "fact of life" that electronics sometimes fail.

    If it's just a power cord then, I presume that, the overheated conductors melt the insulating sheaths and either touch and blow a fuse or trip a circuit breaker upstream, or a human touches an exposed conductor and gets an electric shock or is electrocuted. Coiling is a good way to amplify the temperature rise in a current carrying cable.

    I seem to remember that this happened fairly frequently when self retracting cables were added to vacuum cleaners and extension leads.

    Move along, this is just basic electricity, move along, no electronics to see here.

    1. Electron Shepherd

      Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

      There must be more to it than just the power cord getting hot due to current flow. The amount of power drawn by a Surface will not cause a noticeable temperature rise in the cable. Simple test - next time you're making a cuppa, feel the kettle lead. That's taking 13A - way more than any Surface tablet, and it will be cool to the touch. It won't get even slightly warm, no matter how much you coil it.

      What's more likely is that the insulators between the cores are failing, and the live is bridging over to neutral or earth. That would cause heat to be generated, and would be more likely to occur with cables that have been coiled and uncoiled lots of times.

      1. Scoular

        Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

        Not all cables are equal.

        The amount of conductor is very important and copper is not cheap so using less saves a few $ and makes the cord more flexible too.

        The fact that the cord to your electric kettle does not get hot is irrelevant to the Surface problem.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Facepalm

          Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

          It could be a combination of both; skimping on copper and insufficient/unsuitable insulation between. Don't blame MS tho! Blame that low-ball sub-contractor they tapped to make the cable...

          1. Commswonk

            Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

            Don't blame MS tho! Blame that low-ball sub-contractor they tapped to make the cable...

            Still MS's fault; either they didn't specify the cable properly, or didn't QA check the cables supplied by the supplier / subcontractor. You can delegate carrying out a job to someone (e.g. subcontractor) but if you're selling it it's your responsibility.

            Ultimately it's your reputation that risks damage, not the subcontractor's.

            1. ben_myers

              Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

              YES! Blame Microsoft for not setting decent standards for all the parts that make up a Surface Pro, and making sure that subcontractors meet the standards. But this is a SOFTWARE company still, despite the successes of the XBox and Microsoft-branded mice, and software companies rarely have the necessary know-how to be in the hardware business.

          2. a_yank_lurker

            Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

            @Big John - The final supplier is ultimately responsible for the parts they sourced. Thus MS is responsible as would Apple, Samsung, etc. be in the same situation.

          3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

            "Blame that low-ball sub-contractor they tapped to make the cable..."

            Certainly blame them. But a sub-contractor's faults don't excuse the principal who sub-contracted the work; that's where the buck stops.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

              For the record, I don't actually believe MS is not to blame. I have made a lot of money dealing with their semi-broken software on behalf of clients. You won't see me tooting their horn any time soon.

        2. KA1AXY
          Mushroom

          Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

          AKA: Quality Chinese Engineering

          ...just how cheaply can we make it and still have it work (for a very lax definition of "work")

      2. TheOtherHobbes

        Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

        >feel the kettle lead.

        Heat depends entirely on conductor area relative to current. 0.5A through a thin incandescent filament gets very hot indeed.

        >the insulators between the cores are failing

        This happens when rubber perishes because it's warmed/heated by too much current. The newest Apple MBP chargers are notorious for this.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

        "There must be more to it than just the power cord getting hot due to current flow. "

        Is this the mains cable or the cable to the tablet?

        No mains cable compliant with UL insulation standards is going to get warm under these conditions - it is only going to be drawing around half an amp in the US, and half that in Europe. The conductor size needed for half an amp is tiny. The only thing I can possibly imagine is the use of copper wire that has been hardened, in which case repeated flexing will cause it to crack at various points and the high resistance at the cracks will cause local overheating.

        If it is the SELV cable to the tablet, that could be drawing several amps and some of the cables I have seen used in that situation have been thinner than I would like.

        PSUs often seem to be an afterthought - IBM used to have excellent ones where the housing was so designed that anybody with a brain would automatically wind the SELV cable in such a way that neither it nor the power supply would be caused to overheat. One of the virtues of the BS1363 system is that for wall warts the big prongs remove quite a lot of heat themselves, and tend to provide a firm attachment. The horrible US two pin plug has no such advantages.

      4. teknopaul

        Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

        Nonsense. If you coil a kettle lead and boil the kettle it's a fire risk. An electric motor is just a copper coil passing electric current. All you need to add to a coil with passing current to get it to ignite is a bit of magnetic/ferrous metal that can't move so

        it will heat up.

        Friend of mine set his kitchen on fire plugging a kettle into a coiled up extension lead.

      5. rh587
        FAIL

        Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

        "The amount of power drawn by a Surface will not cause a noticeable temperature rise in the cable. Simple test - next time you're making a cuppa, feel the kettle lead. That's taking 13A - way more than any Surface tablet, and it will be cool to the touch."

        My kettle cable is significantly thicker than the cable for my laptop or tablet chargers.

        Because it uses a thicker gauge of wire appropriate to it's 13A rating.

        Resistance in a wire is inversely-proportional to it's cross section (which is proportional to the square of it's radius). The cross-section of a surface pro cable will likely be less than 10% that of a kettle lead, meaning it will get warm at much lower currents.

        In this case of course, it's more likely to be excessively thin insulating sheaths getting damaged and allowing conductors to touch.

      6. Vic

        Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

        What's more likely is that the insulators between the cores are failing

        That would imply a very low-quality cable. I doubt anyone would actually ship something like that.

        I suspect - with zero evidence whasoever to back this up - that they've used a braided cable to make it more flexible. As the cable is bent, so the individual wires in the braid start to break, leaving the remaining wires carrying proportionally more current; that causes them to heat up more (and be more susceptible to breakage).

        Vic.

    2. thames

      Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

      I don't even know what the cable looks like since I've never seen an MS Surface or know anyone who has one. As long as we are speculating wildly though, the most likely point of failure is where the wire comes out of the terminals at either end. In that case the problem could be insufficient strain relief, poor design of the connection in general, or a combination of that with the type of crimp connection or too much solder wicking if the ends of the leads were solder dipped or the wire is simply too hard or as too few (too thick) strands.

      If you coil the lead tightly, the wire could be breaking at the terminals or pulling loose due to any of the above. If you want to look at things in a more general sense, it is likely that the root cause is someone's cost saving idea ran up against the hard reality of life that wire leads face in the field.

      Wire leads are a commodity item, but there are different grades at different prices and the device product designer has to know what choices to make when specifying one over another. The lead manufacturer will simply give you whatever you ask for because well, they're not in the device business and aren't really expected to know what the end user really needs. That's why they get paid peanuts for their effort.

      P.S. - In a past life I was involved in the design of manufacturing equipment for various types of leads. There's loads of different ways of designing and manufacturing them using different material, all with different pros and cons depending upon what they will be used for and what the customer (product OEM) is willing to pay for.

  3. Mage Silver badge

    SW company?

    They HAVE sold keyboards and mice for a VERY long time. I've even got one MS Mouse that has an ISA card.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: SW company?

      Don't forget the XBox too... They've had practice changing hardware with the RROD.

    2. Richard Plinston

      Re: SW company?

      Microsoft's first hardware product was the 'Z80 Softcard' that ran CP/M on an Apple II.

      """As Steve Ballmer stated during the Microsoft Surface reveal, the SoftCard was Microsoft's number one revenue source in 1980."""

      Before Microsoft was formed, Bill Gates and Paul Allen ran 'Traf--o-data' which made and sold 8008 based computers for analysing traffic data.

    3. ben_myers

      Re: SW company?

      True. But mice and keyboards are much simpler than a computer with all of its accoutrements. Take a laptop-tablet and you have a product 1000x more complicated to engineer and build than a tower or desktop computer.

      1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

        Re: SW company?

        Remember that this is about power supplies. NO hardware manufacturer fully designs and builds their own power supplies. The manufacturer specifies a device connector and the required DC parameters, and the rest is sub-contracted.

        The problem here sounds like it's in the strain-testing of the cables. There's an acceptance test for these things that flexes the cable repeatedly and then checks for breakage, but humans find all sorts of clever ways to damage cables, especially cables that get stuffed into luggage in a hurry.

        And for all those claiming that this is somehow a sign that Microsoft is worse at hardware than the rest of the industry, you might do a search for Apple's power-supply recalls over the years...

      2. Uffish

        Re: SW company?

        It's the ac power cable that fails, it's the ac power cable that is replaced so it is the ac power cable that is the problem.

        How difficult is it to fuck-up the sourcing for an ac power cable? About a 1000 times more difficult than engineering a laptop/tablet.

  4. woolloongabba

    Xbox One power debacle

    Hey Microsoft,

    Can I get a replacement for my Xbox One power cord cause the first one has the best example of coil whine my ears have ever heard?

    Cheers.

    If it has a Microsoft label it usually indicates serious flaws.

    1. Planty Bronze badge

      Re: Xbox One power debacle

      You were stupid enough to buy a xbone despite the 50% failure rate last gen, despite the embarrassing launch fiasco with every week a new about turn.

      You deserve everything you got,

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Get your hate on!

    Pure evil!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sounds better than HP Warranty and support.

    Better than a dead, overheating HP Pavilion laptop with dedicated NVidia/ATI Graphics (using lead free solder), which HP did absolutely everything to deny there were ever any manufacturing/design issues (still happening too), pointing everyone and their dog to bios firmware/graphics software updates to solve the issue.

    At least it saved them a pretty penny, setting a new precedent on what Multinationals can get away with without trading standards lifting a finger in response, not sure about the poor folk paying at £1000 for each and every laptop though.

    At least now companies are upfront about it, designing "duvet blocking" fan vents at the middle, back and bottom of the screen hinge, rather than the side of the laptop, to really trap the heat in while the average student sits in slumber. They can't be blamed then, when you need a new replacement.

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