Interesting post in Microsoft’s Surface Forum from an Enterprise customer who has 200 Surface Pro 3’s, stating that if the battery goes completely flat, it cannot be charged using the Surface Dock (brick dock).
After contacting business support, the response to the customer was” This is as designed“. A Technical summary of the problem from Microsoft Support engineer :
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The reason why this is happening is that the power supply of the dock (although it is 80W) reserves 30W of its power to the ports on the dock, this means that only 50W is available to the Surface Pro. This unfortunately is not enough to trigger the charging/booting.
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Apparently, the dock itself won’t supply enough power for some Surface devices and the original charger that was supplied with the Surface device needs to be used to jump start the charging process. I’m told that if the device is charged first for 5-10 minutes with the original power supply, then the dock can be used(and sometimes even short amount of time works).
To me this sounds like a design flaw.