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.
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.