This is not the first time that the company has blamed software issues for the steady decrease in battery life; it did so in July too but no announcement of fix has been forthcoming until now.

A Microsoft support engineer wrote on 19 August: "Thanks for your patience as we've worked though the details here. We can now confirm that this Surface Pro 3 battery capacity question is not a hardware issue, but one that can be addressed with a software update.

"Our team has been working on, and is now testing, an update that will address this. We’ll publish the update as soon as it has passed our quality assurance process. For now, you should not consider replacing your device as an update is pending."

Microsoft's Surface line of products has faced a number of issues since release. In May, there were complaints about a so-called Sleep of Death bug; when the Surface Pro 4 or the Surface tablet were put into sleep mode for a few hours or more, they were unlikely to wake up.

And in January, top Microsoft blogger Paul Thurrott slammed the company over a number of issues with the devices in an article titled Welcome to Surfacegate.