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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Consider these similar topics:

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?

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How about buying vegetables by weight in the grocery store, but that weight includes inedible stuff. That's a real thing that happens.

Can't think of a vegetable that is only one-third edible.

Oh, I got one! Not a vegetable, but lobster is sold by the pound, but it's only 20% edible meat.

Ha yeah, good one! Bone-in meat is probably bad too (more than 20% edible, but still...)

Sell genetically engineered lobsters that have a far lower meat:crap ratio and see if people are upset when you do a poor job of disclosing that.

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.

I bought a 500 gram bag of pistachio nuts shelled them and found that exactly half of the weight was the shell.

It's the Surface Pistachio.

Artichoke.

Corn-on-the-cob is the closest I can think of, but they're typically sold by the unit rather than by weight.

You can always use the inedible parts to make vegetable stock

Chocos (Chayote).

That shit is 100% inedible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chayote

Actually, I eat that fairly regularly in Thailand, and it's pretty good (and 100% edible) if cooked right :)

Diced in a Thai curry maybe. But served as an unadorned wedge on the side in a meat and three veg meal. Yuck.

Wait, are you saying that his analogies are terrible because they are not real things that happen? [1]

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.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5136374

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.

> those are all cases where no one would tolerate anything more than 0% lossage.

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?

I believe the FTC says screen dimensions must be viewable area. Coming from the CRT days when the bezel did cover part of the screen.

Exactly. The advertising of a consumer product is regulated for the FTC because otherwise it could be confusing / misleading.

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.

Precisely my point.

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.

  | But in his analogies, those are all cases where
  | no one would tolerate anything more than 0%
  | lossage.

If you buy a box of 100 staples, do you count to make sure that there aren't only 92 staples in the box? Would you notice if you only got 33 staples?

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%.

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)

If I bought an apple at the grocery store and it turned out that half of it was taken up by the inedible core, I'd feel pretty ripped off.

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')

A bridge that advertises a 5 ton maximum, but 4 of those tons are used up by the road surface.

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.

It's an analogy.

It's an example of something analogous that would be crazy.

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:

http://i.imgur.com/bYe67.gif

woosh

I think you make good points and was all ready to disagree with the OP until I read your points.

Those are all pretty terrible analogies.

Are they? The difference is the difference between "technically correct" and "correct in a way that is relevant to the consumer".

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.

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