64 GB Surface Pro will only have 23 GB free
marco.org
marco.org
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.
Bingo! - Quality in both Software and Hardware.
And, inside the box, lo behold, is a 64GB hard disk.
Edit: The Nexus 4 8GB only has 5GB of free storage and has no means of extending the storage though a MicroSD or anything else.
There are numbers and there are numbers right?
This is a roundabout way of saying that Microsoft has a problem on its hands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
[1] http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Lapt...
[2] http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...
EDIT: its -> it's
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.
Of course it runs office. And with VMWare or VirtualBox or Parallels...every badly written legacy app is alive and well.
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.
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.
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.
When I buy a computer, the OS takes up some of the space, despite what size the storage lists.
MS disclosed this BEFORE anyone purchased the system.
Where's the complaint?
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.
WTF?
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.
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.
Actually it doesn't. It runs some weird OS with a scrabble board of apps.
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"?
It's better to spend the money on a cheap external device instead of an expensive internal one.
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.
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.
We never really advertised it would work. We can't help that people assumed they would get a working surface!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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?
I have bought plenty of devices and never have I had any of them present me with only 36% of the advertised storage space.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, not seeing any such number on Apple's or Google's store. How many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought?
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.
No, but the problem lies in the valley between the Surface's maximum capacity and the capacity available to users.
Have you ever bought a device advertised with XGB, powered it up, then discovered it really had X/3 GB? That's kind of outrageous.
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 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.
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.
That's not really relevant to the legitimacy of the current argument.
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.
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
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.
Or was it your experience that every time they got a new machine they would complain "Wow, they did it again!" ?
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?
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.
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?
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.
Yes. Expensively. In time and money. Maybe there's room for improvement?
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/
It also doesn't appear on the tech specs page. http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
I don't remember if my phone has two or four cores and I don't know how to find that out on Apple's website.
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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
This has got to be one of Marco's finest trolls so far this year
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.
By promising 64 gb, they are just asking for trouble. Nobody is going to buy it (the lie and product).
It's that or lower the foot print of the OS.
Do you think Microsoft could somehow throw the space in "for free"? How could you even tell?
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.
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.
Yes, quite expensive by Windows PC standards, but a terrific package. You should try one for three months or so.
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.
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.
My question is why the the hell is Microsoft shipping such a pig of a mobile OS?
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.
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.
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.
Selling a device advertised as 64GB of storage with only 20GB~ free IS a problem. Its horribly misleading.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do we know the specs of the SSD? What controller type it's using? TRIM support?
But sure, 75 cubic units.
(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.)
(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.
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."
Then maybe I'd buy one (used, refurbished).
Still that leaves about 29GB for the windows install, and that TBH is a bit insane, 29 for an OS? even if it comes with Office thats just too much.
Microsoft might want to do some trimming there but I wouldn't spent all my time on that.
Don't be surprised it's Microsoft!
They did physical memory compression but forgot how to optimize it well on the dedicated storage.
This is a joke.
You can wipe the hard disk, install Damn Small Linux, and get ~64GB of free storage.
The FTC should consider taking action? What? Why does Marco seem to lose all sense of perspective when it's Apple vs. competition?
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?
Here, Calvin's dad can explain it better than I can:
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.
It's the Surface Pistachio.
That shit is 100% inedible.
A 64 GB tablet shipping with 23 GB free is a real thing that happens even though it shouldn't, which makes his analogies fair.
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.
Who says the size of a TV has to be measured not including the bezel?
Who says the seats in a car have to hold anyone taller than 4 feet?
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.
| But in his analogies, those are all cases where
| no one would tolerate anything more than 0%
| lossage.
In this case, some tablets are delivering on 80 or 90% of their promised capacity whilst others are only managing the vicinity of 25%.
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)
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')
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.
Just think of all the shovelware that gets installed on a typical Windows machine. I have no doubts that Microsoft won't do the same thing.
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.
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.
(b) Maybe Marco hasn't discovered cloud storage yet... Or the microSD card.
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.
> "Surface Pro has a USB 3.0 port for connectivity with almost limitless storage options, including external hard drives and USB flash drives"
Translation: "For the sake of portability ..."
> "Customers can also free up additional storage space by creating a backup bootable USB and deleting the recovery partition"
Translation: "... and for the sake of simplicity ..."
> "Surface also comes pre-loaded with SkyDrive, allowing you to store up to 7GB of content in the cloud for free"
Translation: "... and because we've always poo-pooed Google when it came to the usefulness of their Chromebooks without an Internet connection ..."
"... we are proud to present to you ... surface pro!!!"
It took up an outrageous amount of storage. The same was true for shrink-wrapped Office.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/29/3929110/surface-pro-disk-s...