Posters here comparing it to traditional "space inflation" on drives are missing the point. The difference here is the magnitude. On the box you are told you have 64GB and you end up having only a third of that to use. There's a fuzzy line somewhere and it really feels like this is on the wrong side of it.
Also, if you look at it in terms of dollars and cents, Apple prices their iPads more or less based upon storage so you're looking at a situation where consumers are legitimately making different decisions due to this problem. In other words, a 32GB iPad and a 64GB surface pro are comparable in capabilities whereas a 64gb iPad provides much more storage than the surface. The investment Apple made in reducing the footprint of the OS is basically not being taken into account in pricing.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, Surface Pro runs Windows 8, the iPad runs iOS (not MacOS 10.x)
Here is the typical HP blurb about hard drive space (and as far as Surface Pro is concerned that SSD is a "hard drive")
"Actual formatted capacity is less. A portion of the hard drive is reserved for system recovery software — for notebooks up to: 30GB (Windows 8 & Windows 7), 12GB (MCE); for desktops up to: 30GB (Windows 8), 14GB (Windows 7), 12GB (MCE). For hard drives 1GB=1 billion bytes. " [1]
When is the last time you bought a windows Laptop with less than a 80GB hard drive in it? What was your user experience with that?
Somehow, people seem to thing that the Surface Pro is something other than Win8 but it isn't. It's a laptop with an optional keyboard and a touch screen. It is Microsoft's "take" on the Tablet experience. It is a mashup of legacy code and modern product design. It's an unattractive date with an interest in entomology.
It's a Macbook Air competitor, not an iPad competitor, the Air btw contains this warning for the 64GB model [2] : "1. 1GB=1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less." How much less? They don't even say. But it would be fun to find out.
The 'bug' here is that Hard Drives got super big super quick and nobody back in product management got the memo that SSDs were the new hawtness so trim the fat.
This thread seems to indicate that a MacBook Air with 64 GBs of storage would have about 48 GBs free with just the OS, and a bit less with iLife and some other stock apps. Even with iLife, something that the Surface Pro has nothing like, you are getting more usable storage space.
So, it sounds like the 64 GB MacBook Air is a much better deal by both being a better thought out machine and having more usable storage space.
So, it sounds like the 64 GB MacBook Air is a much better deal by both being a better thought out machine and having more usable storage space.
Ding, Ding, Ding. Give the man a prize. Yes it is, and that is a problem for Microsoft.
The circle is complete, and we can offer Marco an alternative blog post which goes ...
"I was amazed to discover how little space was available to
the user of the Surface Pro 64GB model. Here, here, and here there are discussions of all the things that are pre-allocated from the SSD. Now it is running a full copy of Windows 8, so all of the OS features are available, but lets compare it to the Macbook Air, a machine with a similar price point and similar computational capability. It leaves Y% of the SSD available and its running Apple's laptop OS MacOS 10. Etc, etc."
Perhaps that one will come later. Helps educate the consumer and provides some feedback to Microsoft.
Except the MacBook Air is a much worse deal by not having a touch screen, by not having a digitizer pen, and by not including the equivalent of a free iPad.
You don't in fact get as much capability even if you buy both a MacBook Air and an iPad for much more money. Especially after you've paid for Parallels and a copy of Windows 7 as well ;-)
As for the people who haven't quite figured out that you can keep a lot of your files in the cloud (and create them using Microsoft Office in the cloud), the cheap solution to the "storage problem" is as simple as a microSD card and a bit of copying.
Yes,it would be much nicer to have a 512GB Flash drive built in, but very few people would be willing to pay the price.
I don't know why there is so much hand-waving in this thread to get around this obvious fact. Everyone expects some space to be lost to formatting overhead and the OS. But I can't remember in the last decade when a $900 machine shipped with 2/3 of the disk occupied by the system. That's outside the expected range.
Right... Apple set the precedent of not having to specify the size lost to the OS, because that magnitude was acceptable. Many people probably never even noticed it, or attributed it to the normal bytes lost.
I would have thought the 64GB Surface Pro would be enough storage for me, but if it only has 23GB usable I would need to upgrade to the 128GB model. I've wanted a Surface Pro since the original announcement, but have been really struggling to come up with any good reasons to buy one.
How did Apple set the precedent for that? If you're referring to iOS devices, then they definitely did not set the precedent there. PC manufacturers have advertised total space, not free space, for ages.
Ok, you're right and fair point. PC manufacturers were selling drives with data using up space before Apple. I don't think it was ever very large (in size or percentage of the drive) though was it? Computers weren't branded on HD size either, it was never part of the model number... It was an extra component that could be changed.
I was referring to iP(ho/o/a)(d/ne)s at 2/4/8/16/32GB, losing a decent percentage, without this type of outcry. Sealed devices, marketed on HD size.
How quickly people forget. If you had purchased a 486 with a 20mb hard drive, you'd find dos and windows and norton and whatnot very quickly consuming pretty much all of that space.
One doesn't have to go that far back. I bought an ASUS Eee 900A. It had an 8GB SSD... and Xandros, set up to use UnionFS so you could go back to the original state easily. I took it home, powered it up, and it promptly downloaded enough new versions of packages that the SSD was filled and it hung.
I wiped Xandros, installed what was called Eee Ubuntu (now Easy Peasy) and never looked back (though I since got a bigger SSD, maxed it out on RAM, and happily run Bodhi Linux)--but I can only imagine the wrath of someone who bought one and didn't know that was an option, especially one bought as a gift. I had to wonder whether it was set up to fail.
Not quite. As far as I can tell DOS 3.3 was distributed on one disk for the core OS and commands (~1MB). There were supplemental disks for Basic etc. Windows 3.1 was larger but so were "standard" disks of that time (it was on 7 1.44MB floppies, compressed, but parts were optional).
But there is one huge difference you have overlooked - with your 486 you could install any operating system you wanted. You could even delete bits of DOS you didn't use. With the Apple/Microsoft tablets you can only run the operating system they provide (cryptographically/hardware enforced) and you cannot delete any of the OS.
With that 20MB 486 you could choose what every single byte is used for - and that is true of PCs today. But not for the locked down hardware.
I thought MS's ARM-based devices would refuse to boot anything that is not cryptographically signed with a set of MS-controlled keys. If that's still the case, then they're pretty locked in my book.
Goes back further, even the C64/C20 was hard to squeeze the whole ram out of unless you wanted to scratch build everything. Even a Timex 1000/zx81 didn't get full use of the 2/1k ram. I'm thinking this has been standard literally forever (I'm assuming no one argued over usable space v total space pre-transistor).
That doesn't mean it's right of course - space post-os would be a great spec to have. Also a motivation for more people to question why. A lot of the overhead (CPU, ram and long term storage) on a regular computer or phone is there for good reasons, but I would venture to say the majority of "no-load load" is questionable at best.
When the amount of storage lost to the OS is less than 15% or so, as with iOS or android based devices, it's not a big deal. When the amount lost is 2/3 of the entire capacity, especially for a huge 64gb drive, that's a big deal.
> but have been really struggling to come up with any good reasons to buy one
Recently my friend said that he considers buying a tablet and thinking about a Win8 tablet.
He already owns two quite new laptops. So I asked why he needs a Win8 tablet which main feature is the ability to run desktop apps? If you want a tablet then buy a tablet which has apps designed for tablets.
It doesn't really matter what they're going to do, running actual Windows apps is one of the only major selling points of the Surface Pro (along with performance and the pressure-sensitive pen).
When you buy a pickup truck, they tell you how much load it can haul in addition to the weight of the truck itself. They don't say, "Sorry, by 'three-ton capacity' we really meant 'one-ton' because the truck weighs two."
But they also tell you it has a 350HP motor and don't say how much of that energy is needed to run the power steering, the AC, and just push through the inefficiencies of the transmission system. They will tell you its towing capacity but they won't say that the capacity includes gross vehicle weight, so if you put a quarter ton of supplies in the truck bed you have to remove a quarter ton from the 'towing capacity.'
Some accessories, not all. And specifically not the transmission. They are not quoting you horsepower at the wheels, which is the number you would actually care most about.
If you're saying we should aspire to be as honest as the car industry, could we perhaps aim a little higher and aim for perhaps as honest as the nutritional supplement industry or the mafia?
'This is a natural health product, and by that we mean that we don't want to tell you that the nutritional value of our so-called Vitamin Water is actually no better than drinking a soft drink.'
Horsepower is fairly useless in cars and trucks and buyers know this. If you care about speed, that's what 0-60 is based on as it factors in power/weight. If you care about hauling stuff, you care about how much it can tow and how much it can put in its bed.
This is a roundabout way of saying that Microsoft has a problem on its hands.
Having ~66% of the storage already used out of the box is nuts and most people would be rightly annoyed and frustrated to find this out after buying one.
The correct thing for Microsoft to have done in this situation is NOT release a 64GB model, if they were unable to free up more space.
Thank you. There is a strong HN bias in this discussion, as a lot of people are throwing their arms up and saying "of course! Software takes up memory!"
For me it's about average customer experience. An average customer with 50GB of music would likely purchase 64GB Surface without hesitation. Coming home and discovering it only fits half their collection crosses a (fuzzy) but very real line from acceptable loss to false advertising. They've made a large sacrifice they didn't know they were making when they purchased it.
If this actually was considered false advertising and manufacturers had to advertise usable space instead of HD space, wouldn't that encourage competition? Who cares if the numbers are ugly, I'd be able to evaluate storage as a metric for purchase much more honestly. If something has a 64GB hard drive and only 23GB are available, the number 64 means literally nothing to the average consumer.
Maybe I'd buy it if Windows would be the only thing around..
But I'm comparing it to my system (Ubuntu).
The kernel takes about 70 MB and the entire system (including LibreOffice, Firefox and a basic apps) fits on a CD (including live environment).
That's about 700 MB.
With a full set of development tools and a good selection of applications I come to around 4 GB. That's a number I can comprehend.
Now Windows 7/8 comes into arena somewhere around 16-17 GB on a clean install. This includes the base system, a shell, some tiny utility apps and a Browser. End of list.
> The kernel takes about 70 MB and the entire system (including LibreOffice, Firefox and a basic apps) fits on a CD (including live environment). That's about 700 MB.
Heavily compressed, yes. In actuality, it's more like 5GB, considering all the redundancy inherent in these sorts of binaries.
Regardless, Windows libraries alone come to 10GB (between system32, syswow64, and winsxs), because unlike an Ubuntu LiveCD, they aren't shipping just the libraries for the applications on the disc, but a massive, massive set of base APIs, various different versions, etc. This is the cost of legacy compatibility.
My complaint isn't aimed only at Microsoft for doing this, although this is the worst example I've seen. My complaint is that products are being marketed and sold using a false metric: hard drive space. iPads are sold this way, Android phones are sold this way, and yes, "real windows computers" are sold this way. The fact that you think it's important we're talking about a "real windows computer" in this case only reinforces my point that you're suffering the bias of someone who is well versed in technology.
Trying to persuade consumers with the capacity of the disk drive is meaningless, but to consumers it doesn't seem meaningless. Otherwise, why would they put it in such big print on the box?
Ultimately this only hurts Microsoft (and anyone else who does this) since it worsens some customer's experiences by giving them false expectations. It won't affect all customers and especially not the tech savvy here who are calling the layman stupid for not knowing the difference between "actual formatted capacity" and the number on the package, but real people none the less.
The complaint is that average users are not going to know or understand the difference between "real windows" and "ipad windows". It's also kind of pointless for a salesperson to attempt explaining this to the average user. The surface competes directly with the ipad. It contains an arm chip and probably can't run your old existing windows software.
Regarding FTC action, it's worth noting that MS's page on the Surface Pro (http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-...) includes this small print: System software uses significant storage space; your storage capacity will be less. I freely admit ignorance of the law but to a layman it seems like they've covered themselves pretty well here. I would be curious to know what impact this would have on potential FTC action.
Further, I wonder how easily the "recovery partition" can be disabled and how much space a user could recover. How much is OS and how much is "recovery partition"?
The FTC shouldn't be involved anyway. Is it not true that the system comes with a 64GB SSD? How much of it is free doesn't really matter for the sake of advertising. It's a Surface Pro with a 64GB SSD. This is a hard fact. It might be disappointing, but worthy of legal action? Doubtful. If it was, people would have sued over formatted capacity a long time ago.
It should at least note that only 21gb of space is available in the advertising. The consumers won the lawsuit when screen sizes did not match the advertised screen sizes for monitors.
Maybe microsoft should release a 32gb version of the tablet where you're not allowed to store anything on there. Or if you want to be really sleazy, they could put 128gb of dead chips in there so that they could advertise 128gb of storage where 0gb are actually available.
Don't forget when they used to label backup tapes at twice their actual capacity by "assuming" that your backups gave you 2-1 compression. I got burned hard by that one.
The entire point of recovery partitions is that you can fix the computer without hunting around for media, and if your computer is working enough to download something you probably don't need it.
Couldn't they have an extremely minimal recovery partition that gets you to a device with functional WiFi, then let the download handle the rest? There's no reason for an entire Windows and Office installation to remain dormant "just in case".
You can do that yourself, if you want. It's a feature that you can repair and restore the Surface Pro very easily. You can save 20GB if you are willing to make it harder for yourself. If you copy the 20GB restore partition to a microSD card, maybe not that much harder....
Right. But the vast majority of users will likely never make an effort to remove the recovery partition, and even if somebody wanted to restore their system 6 months or a year from now, they're going to be restoring something that's certainly out-of-date and that requires additional over-the-air updates.
I understand all of the arguments for why they chose what they did. It just seems like the wrong choice given the huge disparity with the marketed capacity that appears on the box.
Because Microsoft wants to crush the idea of installing an OS from generic media (except for enterprise licenses, perhaps) and tie the OS to the device.
Or do what Apple does and just have you plug it into a computer to update. Early iPhones and Touches didn't even have an OS installed from the start; you plugged it in to get that.
The entire point of the Surface Pro is that it is a computer, and doesn't need additional ones to use. Besides, iOS devices haven't needed to plug in to update since (I believe) iOS 5.
It's already a costly device, and a large USB drive in every box would've added even more. You can make your own bootable USB drive and delete the recovery partition if you want that space back, as the article said.
Wait, so you are saying that microsoft would rather waste the costly device inside the tablet? If not for the recovery area they could use a smaller drive after all.
It's better to spend the money on a cheap external device instead of an expensive internal one.
USB drives are 0.5€ per GB, if we are very generous and add a 16GB stick for recovery, that's still only 8€. Even less if you account for bulk discounts. That's hardly a big cost factor, compared to the total price of the tablet.
Anyone running Windows instances on EC2 will tell you that a 30 GB EBS partition only gives you around 10 GB of usable space. Windows takes up a lot of space (15 GB for 32-bit and 20 GB for 64-bit) even before apps get involved.
I remember when the original iPhone debuted, I was completely SHOCKED that Apple was able to reduce the footprint of OS X so dramatically. A 8 GB phone still gave you 6.5 GB of free space. Then with the release of Snow Leopard, Apple more than halved the size of the space required to install OS X.
It is not that Microsoft can't shrink the size of Windows. In fact that is exactly what they did with Windows RT. The problem is on the Surface Pro product they are including compatibility with full Win32 and have to supply all the extra cruft that entails. So people want to run all the native apps like Photoshop, but then complain when it takes too much space :P
To my knowledge Windows RT is only 32 bit at this time. The system utilities like explorer, calculator, paint, etc on 64 bit systems are 64 bit applications.
That's not an entirely fair description. Windows RT is a real Windows 8 installation, but running on ARM, and restricted to running only executables signed by Microsoft.
Well, how do you define "Windows"? Windows RT (not WinRT!) is ARM based Windows that can only run "Metro-Style" apps. With the exception of Office that comes preinstalled on Surface RT. It still has some familiar features like the desktop, command prompt, Explorer, like normal Windows OS but you can't install any desktop software.
Windows RT is not a shrunken version of Windows as we used to know it. It's a new OS, created to run on ARM, the only similarity to previous Windows versions being it's name.
Shrinking Windows means finding a way of reducing or removing the "cruft" you mention.
EDIT: It appears my initial sources were incorrect. Feel free to downvote me, I should have checked a few more places before writing my post.
Windows RT is a ARM build of the Windows operating system as we know it. It even has the familiar desktop but it is closed to run only Microsoft Office (on Surface RT tablet). Users may only install "Metro-style" apps. It is shrunken to include only those components of Windows that Office requires. But one can still start the familiar Command Prompt, Windows (File) Explorer etc. It's very much the familiar Windows we all know.
I tend to find these sorts of arguments silly. They are silly because the tech industry trains people about the specsmanship game early on, generally people learn the game after buying one, or at most two technology products.
The game is simple, there will be associated with a device a numerically significant value. It may be the "version" number, the "memory" number, the "speed" number, the "users" number, but its a number. And two or more apparently identical devices will obey the rule that the bigger numbers are the "better" devices and the smaller numbers are the "less good" devices.
There are two rules that seem to be true in this game;
1) The numbers for the same manufacture will determine which is the better version of the product.
2) When competitors use the same "sort" of numbers, the numbers will be set up to have you compare the products that the competitors want you compare, not necessarily equivalent products.
When Tegra 3 tablets came out and "number of cores" became a thing, Apple started counting everything they could as a core. With storage people use the biggest number they can, with 100GB disk drives really having 95 x 2^20 bytes of storage in them. But hey, 100 sounds better than 95 and 'G' means a billion right? Right!
In the case of storage the 'base' foot print is fixed, so its 64% of a 64G drive, and 35% of a 128GB drive, and 17% of a 256G drive etc etc etc.
Sure its amazing how 'fat' the base OS is on a Surface pro, but since a 256GB SSD today costs the same as an 8GB SSD cost when Windows XP was in vogue (and fits in a smaller footprint if you use mSATA what does it matter?
If it is extremely bad then it means there is room for disruption, a lightweight OS that does all of that and gives you more of the storage. But call out the feds? (the FTC call for action in Marco's post) really?
I read your comment here with ever-growing puzzlement.
The storage spec matters. It's the only spec that truly makes a day-to-day difference in the lives of most users, since it provides an upper bound on the portability of their data.
The less storage you have, the fewer varieties of "complete" libraries of your content you can carry around. Less storage means making tradeoffs like not having your whole music library when you travel, since you really need space for movies on the plane ride. Not having all your photos, because you need room for some games you feel like playing.
Storage space matters every single day. Getting short-changed on it kinda sucks.
Except when Apple decides that there is no need to have a SD slot, and thou shall use iTunes and iCloud to cover all of your needs.
If Microsoft decided to give a 32GB SD card as a "system rescue solution" to the Surface in order to save disk space, Marco would write another rant about how MS does not understand the mobile market, and no one wants to think about storage specs and oh my iPad is sooo pretty and it just works.
If the OS takes up 50 GB, 100 GB or 500 GB, that's Microsoft's problem. They shouldn't pass it on to the consumer, and they shouldn't advertise a device as a 100 GB device, if only 50 GB is available to the user.
If the OS does take up 50 GB, then just use a separate, hidden to the user disk, and then add the 100 GB disk or whatever you're advertising. And don't make the user pay for that extra 50 GB you're using for the OS. He's already paying for the Windows license being included in the price.
This is absolutely not practical, for reasons that you probably know. And the "already paying for the software, so they shouldn't pay for the hardware" bit makes no sense.
Bottom line is: MS is juggling a bunch of different plates with Windows 8 which Apple/Google eliminated by design. For this reason, any technical comparison is worthless.
The Surface Pro is intended to run everything that runs on any previous versions of Windows, run fast, be light, provide both a keyboard and a touch-friendly interface, be enterprise-ready, and people are complaining about the amount of storage available after the install? On the cheapest version?
Some people will always find an excuse to dismiss any and everything that comes out of Redmond. It's unreasonable.
The thing is, I'm too fucking tired of these "arguments". All of these arguments are totally pointless.
Were I to buy a Surface Pro (I won't), I would solve all this drama of the lack of available capacity by just sticking a 64GB SD disk (which I already have, and it cost me $30) on the SD slot. Problem solved! No need to call the FTC. No need to have all nerds from Silicon Valley wasting their time on HackerNews, trying to figure out what percentage of relative size should be considered acceptable to be taken by the OS. No need for yet another discussion about Apple/MS/Google...
Everyone here is smart enough to know that there are tons of trade-offs when designing a product, and in this particular case the trade-off was "yes, MS wants to have a full-blown OS on a mobile-oriented system, which usually require SSDs. SSDs consume less power, are faster, take less space, and the trade-off is cost per gigabyte."
Marco knows that. He knows that MS will have to make one of the following choices:
- Save storage space. They could remove the rescue partition, but then you lose the ability to recover your system.
- Add more storage capacity. They could just offer a 128/256 SSDs. But then their costs go up, and then their base model would have to cost more.
- Use a different/slimmer OS. But then you can't run Windows apps anymore.
- Use a Hard-drive instead of a SSD. But then you'll have higher energy consumption, and it will be slower.
Of all of the design choices, the best one is obviously the one they took. Unlike iOS devices, the Surface Pro is extensible, so storage space is not at a premium.
I will repeat: Marco knows all that. It is just that he is an Apple shill, and he knows that most people that follow him are mostly team Jobs (or team Cook, or team Ive), so it's easy for him to go unchecked. I don't know if it is conscious or not, but this whole thing is just smoke and mirrors. It's pointless punditry, and arguments originated due to pointless punditry are not legitimate arguments.
But you're not getting short changed. You're getting exactly what you paid for. It has a 64GB drive, this is fact. It has 23GB free. This is fact. That's exactly what you paid for. It's standard procedure in computing to list the spec for the hardware without taking into consideration the use of the hardware. When I go to Best Buy and buy a desktop with a 500GB drive, they call it a 500GB drive and not a 450GB drive, even though 50GB of it may be already in use by the OS and the crapware preinstalled.
Yes, storage matters, just like RAM, screen size, and processor speed matters. The fact that you're getting 23GB kinda sucks, but it's a known quantity. You're not being short changed if you receive exactly what you paid for.
Users currently look at the 64GB number as a rough approximation of how much music/files/apps they can store on that device. Maybe they are wrong to do that, but that's the current intuitive assumption for Jane Doe buying an iPod. So with that assumption, they are certainly not getting what the box tells them.
The answer could be to e.g. publish a "usable space" amount on the box. Basically, to eliminate this misconception/miscommunication from the customer's mind.
Yes I am. As an unknowledgable consumer, I would never expect two thirds of the advertised space to be unusable.
And as an unknowledgable consumer I will never need to know what an OS is, or why it is taking up the advertised space on my shiny new toy, which is quickly looking much less shiny, and in all honesty I am now beginning to dislike and mistrust.
So how many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought? How many OS upgrades have you gone through?
My point is not that storage matters, or doesn't matter, of course it does. My point is that everyone who has bought something with storage has experienced the "comes with X amount of storage (note Y is available for users)" verbiage. And Microsoft doesn't go out of the way any more than any other company at "hiding" that information from you. Neither does Apple, neither does Google.
So you read the box/advertisement/review and you gloss over the "storage" number to find the "available storage" number and you see if that will meet your needs, and if not you go to the next higher unit of storage.
I totally get that the first time you buy a technology product you might miss that, especially if none of your friends are technology users, but you also probably missed it the first time you bought a car and noted that the mileage values on the window didn't really match up with what you were seeing. Or after you cut the bone out of that 10 lb Ham you bought and only had 6 lbs of Ham left over.
It seems like faux outrage to me.
Now had Marco gone the other way, public ridicule that it takes 43 freaking Gigabytes to provide a web browser and some apps. Hey I'm all down with that. I mean seriously, I have a multi-user time sharing system for the PDP-8 that runs in 43K words, basically one millionth the space and it includes a FORTRAN compiler.
But that the box says one thing and the actual value to the customer is less than that? Not exactly shocking. YMMV :-)
That's great, was that accidental or intentional? Have you ever had the experience where you shopped for a device and checked to see how much storage was available? And then adjusted your buying preference based on the answer to that question?
It seems that a lot of reviews of devices, be they ultrabooks or laptops or tablets or phone, often have a comment in the discussion about storage about "what is available to the user" Have you ever read a review where they mentioned that?
I'm not arguing that its "fine" that Microsoft only leaves 35% of a 64GB SSD to the user, I'm suggesting that you, Zirro, and perhaps lots of other people, will either look at a review or a description, seek out the available space number and pause and say "Hmm, I think I'll pass." (or if you really must have a Surface Pro, and you want about 64GB of space get the 128GB model, and gripe righteously about how bloated that seems relative to other situations.
Do you yourself personally do this? Do you actively seek out the available disk space when purchasing a new laptop? I think you are fooling yourself if you think even 2% of people do this when buying a new computer. Namely because its rarely if ever in spec sheet.
Yes I do, I think everyone I know does this, but I can't speak for them. These days I shop a lot online but when I wanted to see what the windows 8 "load" was I went over to Fry's opened up explorer on their laptop and right clicked on Properties to see how much space was available vs equipped. (I ended up getting a Win7P laptop but I had done that too with Win7). Opening up the 'software' center in control panel you can scroll down and see how much space each package is using. I also took my current Debian/Ubuntu mashup distro and ran through the apt database to see how much I would need in a second partition to co-boot it and windows, and then compared prices for the stuff equipped with my required size drive (given that) and the smallest available drive. Ended up buying the smallest available (120GB) pulling it and putting in a 500GB drive, and selling the 120GB drive for a net cost about 10% more than the cheaper drive.
Now I certainly don't expect anyone else to be that thorough, but my wife always researches available space and was very disappointed in the Nexus 7 which hit her price point at 8GB but didn't leave enough space for her stuff (and of course no SD card slot which finesses the discussion).
But we can anecdote all we want and not make a lot of progress here. If you believe that you should be able to use every byte of space that is advertised on the box, I'm not going to be able to dissuade you. If you accept that the "actual" space is going to be less than the "advertised" space how do you gauge the risk when you buy? Do you just make assumptions about how much of the advertised space will be available? Do you have some sort of internal metric? 90% good, 10% bad or something like that? Do you ever check that metric pre-purchase?
> If you accept that the "actual" space is going to be less than the "advertised" space how do you gauge the risk when you buy?
It's not even something I consider, because I've generally assumed that disk capacities are relatively comparable between manufacturers. So I base it on my current space and whether or not I need more.
I don't think its unreasonable to expect that a consumer should be able to look at the specifications for 2 different products and come away with a decent idea of their capabilities. Or at the very least, not be completely misled.
If I am going to be expected to put that much effort into a computer, I am just going to go in for the penny, in for the pound and install linux.
Seriously, isn't this shit that my grandmother is supposed to be able to purchase? Your nerdish idiosyncrasies don't excuse this sort of anti-consumer behavior. It is crap like this that will have me seemingly forever recommending Apple to people I know, and I hate Apple.
So you think this is ok because "people should know because they should have been burned by this before"?
I don't care if it's "the truth", it's still deception. It's a total outlier. If I sell you two televisions with 42" displays and one is nearly 42" like ever other one but the other is 42" but the bezel for some strange reason covers it so it's actually 16" are you ok with that? Oh wait, that analogy doesn't work because at leas then you can see the fraud before you make the mistake of buying it.
>My point is that everyone who has bought something with storage has experienced the "comes with X amount of storage (note Y is available for users)" verbiage.
There has never been a system I know of which has advertised to have that much space and had so little available, not even relatively. The used space was always almost irrelevant low (be it Windows XP with the hdd available at that time, be it Win 95, heck, even Vista used less - and Android of course, also webOS, behaved better, when going into the mobile space). So - at least if i am not completely mistaken: how should anyone have ever experienced that scam?
> My point is that everyone who has bought something with storage has experienced the "comes with X amount of storage (note Y is available for users)" verbiage.
Yeah, not seeing any such number on Apple's or Google's store. How many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought?
I remember reading a statistic somewhere that said the vast majority of device owners do not fill up the entire storage of the device. So I'm not entirely convinced that it matters at all.
You're going to have to do better than vague remembrances to make that point compelling.
In the age of mobile gaming, apps and content stores, it's absurdly easy even for non-technical users to fill up their devices. I buy that not everyone filled up their 2003 iPod. And that's probably the root of what you're recalling – Apple figured out they could sell a much smaller one and people would still buy. Today is different.
Either way, if you're a company selling devices with different tiers of storage, the spec clearly matters to the person making decisions based on that spec.
They are silly because the tech industry trains people about the specsmanship game early on
And after ~25 years in tech, I am sick of the omnipresent bullshit. I am tired of having to apologize to non-tech people for the assholes who inhabit tech marketing departments. We need less gamesmanship and more honesty.
On a more general note, WTF does an operating system need 41gb for on a fixed hardware platform?
I certainly agree with your last comment about WTF.
As you know it isn't a "new" problem. When I joined Sun Microsystems I was interested in learning what marketing folks did so I started work on that side of the house. One of the things they did was try to make the stuff sound as good as it could sound. So if you could sell something for 4999 you called it "Under $5000" and if your graphics card could do two million triangles / second you said "millions of triangles per second." When I transferred over to the kernel group to do development SunOS 3.2 had shipped and we were working on 3.5. There was a lot of pushback that adding things was pushing up the base system size such that 40 MB disk drives weren't going to have a lot of space left. Fortunately the cost of an 80MB disk was now down to the same price as the old 40MB one. The choice, as we saw it, was 'delete features to keep the size down' or 'have people get a bigger disk'. That wasn't particularly uncommon then or now in terms of tradeoffs.
On one of the developer panels at a user's group meeting someone asked me what would be the disk and memory requirements for SunOS 4.0 and my honest answer was we expected it to take about $400 worth of disk space and $800 worth of memory. It was a functionally correct answer (although not appreciated as you can imagine) because it took into account that the longer Sun worked on it the bigger the requirements got but the cost to buy the compute resources was staying flat relative.
It is a huge marketing issue. Consumers will get news of this and think that they are being taken for a ride. Even if it is true or not, they will believe the websites that are calling foul. Its not really about the actual specs, but about the market perception of the product. Having 23GB avaliable from 64GB makes people think that this gadget is a bloated and slow piece of shit. That's how people think.
Don't matter if its nicer than the Apple or Androif offerings.
> When Tegra 3 tablets came out and "number of cores" became a thing, Apple started counting everything they could as a core.
I think you picked the wrong example. The word "core" appears only once on this page, and it's in a different context. http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/
The game is simple, there will be associated with a device a numerically significant value.
It's even simpler, when MS says 64GB, I'd wager that most people expect to have about 64GB free to fill. MS should make it clearer, this may be the 64GB version but with 23GB available.
Makes a lot of difference, so people should know what to expect: extra programs take space and so do movies, songs etc. This is vital, not some useless spec to brag about
Especially when it was popular on various forums a few months ago to rag on the iPad and various price points for still shipping with 16GB when the Surface was shipping with 64GB. It takes a lot of wind out of those sails when it ships with 64GB only because it has to, not because it provides a much better cost:storage ratio.
"It's even simpler, when MS says 64GB, I'd wager that most people expect to have about 64GB free to fill."
This is where we disagree. I could certainly understand that they might thing there would be more of the 64G available to them, but if they were Microsoft Customers before this and the installed Windows on a 64GB drive they know that after the install not a whole lot is left for them.
I would bet a majority of the people who buy PC's think the HDD space listed is what's available to them. I worked at a help desk in college and it was a frequent complaint among users that their hard drive shows less available than what the box said when helping them set up their computer. Your average user isn't going to think about OS size.
I think you make my point. So did the same student complain more than once about their misunderstanding of what was stated versus what they got? I'm sure you explained to them that the OS and other things took up space and that came out of the one hard drive in the system. And I would guess that they understood that explanation, and then when they made future purchases they would "expect" that some of the space was taken up by OS and other things and perhaps, if they were careful shoppers, they would read through the foot note to figure out exactly how much before they bought it.
Or was it your experience that every time they got a new machine they would complain "Wow, they did it again!" ?
Obviously those people would not be surprised in the future with a similar purchase. If those same students would go and buy a Surface Tablet, I'd be willing to bet that they would be upset about the lack of "free space", especially the amount that is described in the above post.
It's a totally different machine to your average consumer. They more than likely think of it akin to an iPad and not a full blown PC.
Yes, the majority on this website know how available storage works but we as a whole are a very small minority in the PC consumer world.
Hmm, I think if you want to contest the reasoning you need a definition of 'obviously deceptive' that we can agree on.
What if someone told you that the exact same amount of "Storage space" is free on Windows 8 laptop with a 64GB SSD? Does that change your perception of the argument? I'm trying to ascertain whether or not you are comparing the space usage of the Surface Pro to that of a phone, a tablet, or a laptop. If so what was the basis for your comparison choice?
When I installed Windows 8 a few weeks ago, the 64-bit install was about 20GB so where the hell is the other 21GB going?
Is the recovery partition literally a mirror image of the default install? That sounds ridiculous because the thing is basically a computer so could have a USB-restore, but I don't see how they get to 40GB+ otherwise.
<facetious>21GB of trials and time-limited software? </facetious>
Plausible: 20GB for Windows, 10GB for recovery, 4GB for the hibernation file (has to match RAM size), leaving 6GB for the swap file, system restore points and preinstalled software.
Seems like they could have something like a (but a little more nuanced than) union-FS for the primary partition joining it with the recovery partition. Only updated files would need to take space on the primary partition, untouched files would be sourced from the recovery partition. To restore you just wipe the primary. Of course, there is an entire blog written about how sensible ideas like that are completely impossible: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/
Reminds me of the common shock when an european travels to North America and finds out that restaurant listed prices do not include taxes nor (massive in comparison) tips.
It's all storage and it's a valid measure, especially if you consider that perhaps some stuff can be uninstalled to make more room. In practice, whoever cares about the exact amount of free space will find out, and whoever doesn't will just use the numbers to label same-kind devices as 'bigger' and 'smaller'. Comparing numbers from different types of devices is as meaningful as comparing version numbers from competing software products.
But the average consumer doesn't think like that. They see a 64gb iPad and a 64gb Surface. To most people, that's like a 3 meter rope and a 3 meter cable. They're the same measurements, and they "should" be the same.
If the average consumer does not understand the difference between an iPad and a Surface Pro, then the misguided GB comparison is the least of their problems.
Wow, Microsoft definitely deserves some kind of award for this. Shipping a tablet, with own hardware design no less, with a 41GB OS is certainly an achievement not every company can accomplish. (sorry I'm just baffled how you can fill up 41GB)
I cant help but think that a better option would have been to offer a "recovery usb stick" for extra 50 bucks which would contain the recovery data and save the extra space for the user to make the device more attractive to the buyer.
It's not insane, it's a rational marketing decision. Users buy on the headline price, and price plus $50 would be much less attractive. People who want to move the recovery partition to their own choice of "recovery usb stick" can do so.
Anyone who actively refuses to buy an Apple or Android tablet in favor of one of these overpriced monstrosities is 100% cutting off their nose to spite their face. I just can't even begin to fathom why Microsoft would go out of their way to cater to such an infinitesimal group of people who feel that a laptop is not portable enough, yet need the full functionality of god-knows-what program that probably doesn't even work properly with Windows 8.
Well we know there are hundreds of millions of people who think a laptop is not portable enough anymore - look at all the ipad and android tablet sales.
They just want something that's as portable as an ipad, but can run windows software like Office, Photoshop, etc. These windows tablets also mostly have active Wacom digitizer screens for real stylus support, and include Microsoft OneNote, which is a full-featured note taking program that is nice for students. This has been the kicker, we want the tablet form factor, but we want to use productivity tools (which mostly depend on having a mouse, keyboard, and/or stylus).
Unfortunately, the windows tablets are overpriced, and lower cost Windows RT tablets can't run standard Windows software, and the more powerful tablets like Surface Pro with an i5/i7 processor need a noisy and hot fan, AND the design of Windows 8 is confusing to virtually everyone who is familiar with Windows 7 or older.
My ideal would be a tablet with detachable keyboard like an Asus Transformer but that can run Ubuntu (actually, you can install Ubuntu on an Asus Transformer, but it is too slow). The Asus Vivotab TF810C has the clovertrail processor which apparently isn't going to support linux, and the Asus Transformer Book is a heavier beast with a fan due to the i7 processor.
For comparison, Windows uses up about 20 gigs, as does OS X on a Macbook Air with SSD drive. The difference is windows also has a) recovery partition b) hibernate file c) the typical crapware that comes with every windows computer
This has got to be one of Marco's finest trolls so far this year
Actually, including the OS and the pre-installed apps, OSX on a MBA with a SSD takes up just under 10GB.
Also: "The difference is windows also has a) recovery partition b) hibernate file c) the typical crapware that comes with every windows computer"
You just proved why it's a disaster out of the gate. "Typical crapware" especially. The entire comment section is one of the finest trolls so far this year.
Does Microsoft disclose the usable space on their devices before purchase? If so, then I really don't see the problem. The device has a 64GB flash chip, and that's what the advertising says. All devices use some portion of their advertised space out of the box, so if you want to draw an arbitrary line and save customers 15 seconds of research before buying their expensive electronic device, I guess that's your prerogative.
Because if they sold it as a 20 gbyte unit, but priced it as a 64 gbyte unit, they'd get called out for that instead. Damned if you do; damned if you don't.
It's not the user's problem that the OS takes up that much space. The user is already paying for the license. He shouldn't have to pay twice (that 40 GB of SSD space is pretty expensive).
Compatibility is a huge reason why so many people still use windows. Compatibility with older applications and formats. That's what takes up so much space.
They promise a 64GB flash chip, and that's what they deliver. Unless they are concealing or deliberately lying about the user-available space, which doesn't seem to be the case, I really don't see the problem.
If those numbers don’t sound as good, or the
manufacturers don’t leave themselves any room for OS-
update expansion without changing the names of their
products mid-cycle, that’s their problem to solve, not
ours.
The argument my Marco is simple really - walk the talk.
While I get that Windows + pre-installed apps + recovery partition takes up space. When I saw that only 23GB is left after a 64GB capacity, I was shocked.
Compare this to iOS or Android and you'll find it's going against my expectation. I doubt I'm alone. 23GB is not a lot of space these days if you plan to use it for something serious.
It didn't take me three months to realize that the touch cover made for a shitty keyboard, the touchpad was microscopic, and the kickstand made the whole thing unusable for a lot of "precariously perched" use cases (seated on the couch, seated on the train or subway).
If it's a good computer, you'll like it immediately in the store. If it takes three months to get used to the weird form factor, Microsoft will never sell any of them.
The way people are reacting to this reminds me of the initial reaction to Macs ditching the floppy drive or the optical drive.
Surface has a fully functional USB port, and Windows 8 supports a bunch of cloud-driven integration out of the box. More and more, I've been moving my important documents online (with the exception of raw audio & video files, which are still too large to bother hosting online right now) If you want more storage, slap an external drive on your Surface.
That said, I can't argue that advertising it as a 64gb tablet is any more sensible than Ticketmaster advertising $15 tickets, only to charge you $10 in handling fees when you actually make the purchase. It's not straightforward, and comes off as misleading.
But I can't help but thing... What kind of operating system is FORTY ONE GIGABYTES?! My C:\Windows is 20GB, that seems excessive already, and I know for a fact it was originally much smaller. What the hell are Microsoft putting on these things?!
That's my question too. Maybe I'm just old, but 40 gigs is what, about 8 DVD-length movies or 400 hours of MP3 music? All that to display text and colored squares on the screen? I mean, I appreciate that there is a lot to the different runtimes, especially .NET, side-by-side DLLs, etc., but just a few years ago the entire OS came on a 700 meg CD.
What's really scary is how fast I've seen my Windows installs bloat with service packs, side-by-side assemblies/DLLs, etc. It wouldn't take much for the entire 64 gigabytes to be swallowed by C:\Windows alone.
Mac OS 10.8 takes up something like 13GB in total, including swap space. The recovery partition on a new Mac is tiny, containing just enough to download the install image over WiFi.
Granted, not entirely comparable - 10.8 doesn't contain nearly as much legacy cruft as Windows does, but that's still a far cry from the 40GB taken up by Windows on the Surface Pro. A 64GB Macbook Air would have something like 45GB useable.
Windows also tends to grow over time in ways that Mac OS doesn't, because Windows was built around the idea that you have ample hard drive space available. So you have restore points, backups of replaced system files from updates, caching of installed update packages and MSI packages, multiple versions of nearly every system library just in case some application really really needs one specific version... They all provide useful functionality, but were designed around having huge hard drives, where Windows taking up 50GB wouldn't be a big deal. Same thing with the separate swap and hibernate files - potentially more reliable but still chews through disk space that you might not be able to spare on a small SSD.
As I said, it's not a pig of a mobile OS, it's a full copy of Windows 8. You know, that's like Mac OS X <feline animal>. And it doesn't fit on a ROM chip.
Not surprised. Windows in general is extremely inefficient with disk space. It keeps multiple copies of every patch and system dll under the Windows folder for defensive purposes.
Recent releases have added "restore points", winsxs, csc, and SoftwareDistribution\downloads, to the original dllcache.
I'm not joking when I say you can easily free up 10GB+ on an installation that has been around a while; 100GB if a service pack has been installed. And it only grows unless you actively manage it.
This is the shitty design these NT based tablets are facing. It could probably be solved by moving all this crap out of the system folder and into its own folder with an expiration date.
I know! How dare an OS and its applications take up space on the hard drive! This is certainly unprecedented and has never happened in the history of PC's and laptops.
There is nothing misleading about it. There is 64GB of storage, and if you want to use more of the available space, remove some of the software it comes with.
If you wish for intelligent discussion, how about we discuss a more interesting topic. How much free space should be expected? Should a non-techy device such as the Surface sacrifice space in order to make their user experience better? Where do you draw the line?
Alright its not misleading, but it is strange. I know someone will call me out for comparing the iPad and Surface Pro, but if both devices are priced as "64 GB tablets" when you turn on your iPad you get ~55GB. The surface pro reportedly has only 23GB available. That's less than half. Look at it the way, you can buy a 32 GB iPad, magically get a Mountain Lion install on there, and be left with just about the same amount of free space.
Imagine they were selling water bottles. Apple/Android's waterball was 8" tall and has a shape such that 6% of the shape of cylindrical shape doesn't actually hold water. MS sells you the same thing however the water bottle is half the size, for the same price. Most people will just shrug off the 6% as a "Fact of life", but over 50% and that's just wrong. As another user commented, an imaginary fuzzy line between "fair" and ripped off has just been crossed.
One should expect how ever much is advertised. In this case 64GB's of storage is advertised implying there is 64GB's of storage accessible to the user.
Of course we have NEVER had the full space advertised by storage devices accessible for a multitude of reasons. We mainly go along with this because its advertising. But thats my point here, the advertising is getting out of hand, when you get a device and you have less then 1/2 of the advertised space that SHOULD be a problem.
On a side note the Surface and much less Surface PRO are no longer "techy" devices? I don't necessarily agree with that, but that and your statement are both opinions.
No, one shouldn't, because that hasn't been true of any comparable electronic device or computer in the last 5 years. You confirm this in your next paragraph, so I don't understand why you included the first paragraph.
It's not "just advertising." There truly is a 64GB chip in the device.
You forget we are talking about the Microsoft Surface tablet - A non-techy device with a target demographic of completely different users with different needs. Apples and oranges.
The difference between Microsoft and Apple: Apple would never have had the 64 GB one, because of this issue. They would just have the bigger drive, and charge more money for it.
If you sell a version of your product that is going to leave a bad taste in the mouth of a large percentage of your users... is it worth selling?
Do you remember when digital cameras were first starting to use flash memory? You could buy models that didn't have card slots but only included a few MB of flash. Nothing says quality like a new expensive digital camera that can only take less than 20 pictures. I bet a lot of people were unhappy about that.
Apple tends to be very opinionated, but they usually don't release near crippled products. They're willing to forgo the low-end sales to ensure a better experience.
This is just an odd decision. Why not ship with 96 GB and put some of that (say the 20GB system restore partition and the hibernate file) on a 32 GB partition that isn't shown to the user.
This seems like a very poor choice on Microsoft's part. Some consumers won't care, some consumers will get feel ripped off, no consumers seem better off.
Ignoring the dumb FTC idea, the 64GB Surface Pro does seem like an oddly pointless device. I can't imagine people shelling out for this relatively expensive PC would find it a good deal to save 10% off the price to have a cripplingly limited storage budget, or to use up the SDXC slot on a drive almost as expensive as the price differential.
For MS, I can't imagine it'll be worth the bad PR to be able to advertise a $899 starting price instead of $999.
The moral of this story is not to buy the 64 GB Surface Pro. Hopefully Microsoft will get the message and either reduce the footprint of the OS or only ship 128 GB and above Surface Pros.
There is a perfect market solution to this. Don't buy it. Now that I know that the OS takes up an insane amount of space, I have no interest in this product.
Another issue this raises is the likely hood of most to all free space being used up and the impact this will have on the life and performance of the SSD and the Surface Pro is a whole.
Do we know the specs of the SSD? What controller type it's using? TRIM support?
My car has 75 cubic units of space. But 50 units of that are taken up by the engine, dashboard, heater, steering wheel, door panels, insulation matting, seats, spare tire, etc. So there's only 25 cubic units left for people and carrying.
(It's also interesting to see Marco try to nuance this post. All the Mac pundits have been posting it as a "haha, stupid Microsoft" which is probably why it came to his attention, but he tried to write his blog post in a generic way, that this is a problem with all of these devices.)
The odd thing is that Windows 8 minimum disk requirements are only 20 GB
(spitting coffee across room) Only 20GB!? I can get a full Linux install, including desktop, development environment, graphics editors, office suites, etc, etc, etc for less space than that! It's sad that people have come to accept "only 20GB" as "not that bad". This reeks to me of the issues MS had trying to shoehorn windows on to netbooks, and just not getting it.
The only reason this is even a story is because of Flash drives with lower capacities. On the desktop, I literally don't care about the tiny fraction of my 3 TB drive the OS is taking up.
Yes, precisely: Microsoft has never had an issue with releasing a product that eats all the RAM, CPU cycles and hard drive space it could get. Every new release of a Microsoft product had not just the pains of learning a new layout and dealing with the bugs and security holes, but also going through the upgrade cycle, yet again, because Microsoft doesn't seem to care (or be capable) of writing efficient software. Only now that storage on desktops and laptops has given us a glut of capacity do we not care.
But in the mobile space, where resources are obviously more limited, Microsoft is a joke: they are so laughably far behind the open source solutions (and Apple) designed to run stably, smoothly and without upgrades for years (decades, even), that we really shouldn't be surprised. 20GB on a desktop or laptop drive where 1000GB has been the norm for a while? Sure, no problem. But even getting Windows 7 down to 17GB so I can get it to fit (along with a few other essentials) on a 60GB SSD for my work development machine was a PITA that shouldn't be necessary. There's no excuse, even if we are "used to it."
Partly it's one of the pains of backwards compatibility. Unofrtunately Microsoft cannot, like Apple, just throw people who use its old stuff under a bus....
Surface Pro is Win8 + pre-installed tools (e.g. Office Suite) + the recovery partition. The last 2 likely aren't included in the official w8 disk requirements.
That's what I thought (and it's a pretty good counter-argument to the space issue if space is being used by free desirable software) but the small print on the Surface with Windows 8 Pro page says "Word 2013 and Office 2013 are sold separately."
But the Surface Pro DOES have 64GB of memory,right?
If it does,then your argument is invalid. It might need to ue 41GB for the system,but the name is absolutely correct.
So basically marco assumes a standard that punishes bundling? A windows 8 tablet that comes bundled with a full office suite needs to advertise itself as 5-10GB smaller than the identically configured but less functional tablet without the bundle? Using 66% of shipped free space on a 64GB tablet is clearly wrong, but you can say that without coming up with some synthetic standard that nobody will ever follow.
In a couple of years this will be unimportant as SSD drives grow in size (and not in price). We've seen this over and over with every new storage media.
Microsoft might want to do some trimming there but I wouldn't spent all my time on that.
I'm running Win8 Pro on my laptop. The OS weighs in at about 25GB which means the rest of the bloat comes from the pre-installed apps. Can they be removed?
A full version of Windows 8 Pro and backup partition of the same (which, from what I understand, you can put on an external drive and have an extra ~20GB)
iOS isn't MacOS but Windows 8 is just another Windows! The inefficient disk space usage is quite infamous with Windows. They managed to fit the physical memory by memory combining but failed how to manage the files on storage.
Don't be surprised it's Microsoft!
They did physical memory compression but forgot how to optimize it well on the dedicated storage.
A "5 seater" car, where some critical part of the car occupies 3 seats so you only have 2 for people.
A box of 100 staples, where 64 are used to hold the box together, so you only get to use 36
A 50 inch plasma TV, where the bezel accounted for 32 inches of that.
A car advertised as getting 30MPG, but when you put seats, seat belts, a heater, air conditioning and a radio in there it only gets 20 MPG
It feels a lot like getting ripped off to me.
Obviously we're power users, so we're willing to dive into this and understand that when you buy a 64GB device, you don't get that much storage. Do you think the general public understands that?
No, I think his analogies are terrible because this an issue with people because of the amount of the free space, not the general concept. Like there is no outrage when we lose 10-20% of our space to the system. But in his analogies, those are all cases where no one would tolerate anything more than 0% lossage.
Not that my vegetable analogy is not terrible, but at least it's a case where lossage is normal, and it's just excessive lossage that we would be upset about.
Harddrive space is consumed like flour or sugar is, not as eggplants are.
Nobody says "I want n pounds of eggplant", rather they say "I want n eggplants". They then pay based on weight, for the convenience of the grocer.
On the other hand, you don't want "n bags of flour" but rather "n pounds of flour". If flour were being sold such that more than a miniscule single-digit percentage of that weight were actually packaging, people would be justifiably upset.
Car seating is DMV in the US. And yes, they have specs - you can't claim it seats more than average amounts of humans without backing that up by claiming they're unusually small.
Vegetables are WYSIWIG; this Surface thing less so.
It is a bit as if they sell you a one pound coconut with a sticker "a pound of coconut milk" on it.
Historically, companies have been forced to change their ways for less (prime example: monitor sizes used to be measured on the display area, but that grew to 'visible part of the CRT' and from there to 'CRT diagonal', and, IIRC, 'diagonal extended to the edge of the housing')
That's a good point, but I think we need to also consider variability between similar products. For example, whilst a lobster might only be 20% edible, that is what people have come to expect of lobsters. All lobsters roughly obey that ratio.
In this case, some tablets are delivering on 80 or 90% of their promised capacity whilst others are only managing the vicinity of 25%.
I would imagine peanuts in the shell probably have close to half the weight being the inedible shells. What about a coconut? I'm sure there is some kind of vegetable product where you don't eat 2/3 of it.
For instance; Peas. I hate peas, so I consider them well short of one-third edible.
Maybe the Surface Pro should be called the Microsoft Eat Your Peas.
Good point, though I would argue that Vegetables are low tech and people have been buying them for hundreds (thousands?) of years, so the laymen clearly understands what he's getting and not getting.
All of my examples are high tech and recent, to the point where a lot of the customers would never have bought such a product before, thus have no idea what they are getting and not getting.
For these complicated products, it needs to be spelled out more clearly, and maybe even regulated as suggested.
(I've never bought a TV, and I'm still confused about how they're measured, for example)
What? Where do they do that? If they did, then that's pretty crazy. How can they say the "bridge can support 5 tons", but it would only support 1? That would destroy the bridge when some large vehicle tried to pass over it.
Actually, the system they use measures only the useful load supported by the bridge, not the road surface and other bridge components. It's really quite elegant.
Here, Calvin's dad can explain it better than I can:
I think the TV bezel example is spot on. But the problem with analogies is if you are of the opposing point of view, then you look for differences rather than similarities, so no analogy would work.
Approximately 0% of Microsoft's target customer base will wipe and install Linux. People buying this thing want Windows.
I would normally agree re: Marco (I've had to move on as he further embraces Apple linkbait), and there's no chance the FTC intervenes here, but this is absurd. We're not talking about losing 4GB on an iOS device--users are losing two-thirds of the Surface's advertised capacity the moment they set it up.
Actually, they have a pretty strict policy of not including shovelware, to the point that the Microsoft Stores will, for a small fee, remove all the shovelware from a computer that they didn't even sell.
Microsoft CANNOT prevent licensees from loading any old crap they like. The US Justice Department sued Microsoft to establish this fact, and put a judge in oversight for the next decade.
The DoJ also prevented Microsoft from doing deals with the top 10 Windows OEMs, and compelled it to supply them all at the same price. This prevented Microsoft from doing any deals that would be unfavourable to any OEMs who chose to provide slow, badly-installed, crapware-filled systems.
Obviously this was a tremendous benefit to the American public, and to the rest of the world, which doesn't have a choice or a voice when the DoJ makes the rules.
There's nothing wrong with the idea in principle, it's just that OEMs have a bad habit of putting on too much stuff, and putting on stuff that nobody would want (or should have).
It's just all those installers (yes, I'm talking to you Adobe and Oracle) that do everything they can to trick you into installing "toolbars" and other crap.
I don't think the difference is "huge". I'm a professional programmer and even I'm surprised by the advertised space versus the usable space. I'd have guessed you'd have like 54GB or so free, not 23.
I find marco to be a bit of a pro-Apple shill, eclipsed only by Gruber and Siegler, but he's right here, and I say that as someone who is often accused of being a Microsoft-shill by my more hardcore FOSS buddies.
This is actually institutional for Microsoft. Years ago, when I was developing using Visual Studio and it came on a set of CDs, I saw an article claiming that installing it and MSDN (their offline help system of tech notes since the dawn of time) made you feel like Godzilla had shit on your hard drive.
It took up an outrageous amount of storage. The same was true for shrink-wrapped Office.
I think the difference here is that the OS and full versions of Office are installed with no preconfiguration, whereas the complaints you're referring to were about installing the full version of VS and MSDN including all sample code, lengthy documents, help and test binaries would necessarily take up a large amount of space back then.
Also, if you look at it in terms of dollars and cents, Apple prices their iPads more or less based upon storage so you're looking at a situation where consumers are legitimately making different decisions due to this problem. In other words, a 32GB iPad and a 64GB surface pro are comparable in capabilities whereas a 64gb iPad provides much more storage than the surface. The investment Apple made in reducing the footprint of the OS is basically not being taken into account in pricing.