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.
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.