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Comment by monkeyfacebag | Hacker News Reader

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"?

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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.

People did sue over formatted capacity a long time ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Legal_disputes

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.

> How much of it is free doesn't really matter for the sake of advertising.

We never really advertised it would work. We can't help that people assumed they would get a working surface!

It's baffling to me why they wouldn't just make the "recovery" partition a download or put it on a USB drive to begin with.

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.

Don't Macs come with an Internet Recovery partition? It's about 500Mb and boots to enough of an OS to download the rest and reinstall needed.

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.

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