Now Digitimes appears to have found out that Redmond shipped 2.5 million Surface-series tablets in the fourth quarter of 2015, leading to total shipments for the year reaching six million units.

Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book sales increased and this contributed to growing Surface revenues.

Optimistic analysts had predicted that the best that Microsoft could do was four million because everyone knows that Apple invented the tablet and Redmond does not know what it is doing.

Global notebook shipments are expected to remain weak in 2016 although the rate of decline is expected to narrow, shipments of Surface 2-in-1 products are likely to grow another 30 percent on year to eight million units in 2016. Microsoft announced recently that its Surface revenues grew 29 per cent in year in the second quarter of its fiscal 2016, which ended December 31, 2015.

Meanwhile Microsoft has begun developing new Surface models in cooperation with supply chain makers, with new products likely to be unveiled in the second half of 2016, said the sources.

There had also been a positive knock on effect from HP, Dell and Lenovo, who have been following suit and come out with similar tablets of their own.HP announced its HP Elite x2 at CES 2016 which is a high-end 2-in-1 model features a 12-inch Gorilla Glass 4 display and an Intel Core M vPro processor.