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Comment by schiffern | Hacker News Reader

iOS takes up less than 4 GB out of the box.

comparing iOS to Surface pro is just a example of what is wrong with the article and some of the comments here.

compare osx to the surface pro. Oh wait. OSX doesn't run on anything less than a Macbook Air which weighs 2.8 lbs. It also ships with 80gb and 128gb disk of which I do not know what is available to users. the 80gb air sells at $999 and the 128gb at $1099. And the air doesn't function as a tablet, does not have a touchscreen display etc etc.

Seriously poor reporting here. Compare apples to apples and then buyers can make informed decisions.

I agree that this (MB Air vs Surface Pro) is the larger story, and its not being well covered, but I lay some of that at Microsoft's door rather than the press. Generally there will be a 'press kit' with the demo device which highlights things that the manufacturer thinks are important.

I've not seen Microsoft's press kit for the Surface Pro. It has been my experience though that when I have seen the press kit the story written at least mentions all the high points, if only to disagree or dismiss them.

This is indeed a very serious problem for Microsoft.

Because they are positioning this device as a laptop and a tablet.

To not want comparisons with the iPad completely misunderstands what people are expecting from a tablet.

Microsoft was very vocal about the iPad being an expensive and useless netbook. And that people don't really want a tablet experience, they want a fully fledged OS.

Time will tell.

The QNX kernel fits in L1 cache...

But it's rather unlikely that the entire Blackberry operating environment using it does, which is what is really being compared here.

Oh I'm sorry. I thought the ideas was to make irrelevant statements about the size of software components.

That doesn't mean it has 124GB available for users.

Minus some filesystem bookkeeping information and os , what else takes up the space?

The difference here is pretty obvious to me. The Surface can stand alone, recover and reset itself, etc. The iPad, should something go wrong, is a useless brick without Apple's helpful malware called iTunes available on another PC.

Chances of a user messing up an iPad OS install are much slimmer than with a Win 8 device.

There are lots of obvious differences. Both companies have compromised on the ideal of a light device that runs nearly forever ona single charge, has a high resolution screen, a powerful processor, plenty of memory, all the apps you need, &c.

Each company has made different compromises. The question is, to whom are those choices/differences meaningful?

Being able to use a Surface without access to a Mac or PC is meaningful to people who are buying a primary PC that happens to have a detachable screen. Being able to store all of your music or movies on it is meaningful to those who are buying a post-PC device.

I don't know why you call iTunes "MalWare," but it sounds to me like you'd compute on an Abacus before you'd use an Apple device.

I've purchased 4 Macs in the last 4.5 years.

Two Macbook Pros and two Macbook Airs. I'm both clumsy and impatient and a huge fan of them. I'd only consider something like the Thinkpad Carbon with a better screen over my Macbooks. That having been said, iTunes could greet me with a cup of coffee and sex in the morning and I would still scoff.

My comments weren't meant to say anything about iPad or Surface. Personally, I think that Surface is a great start and I think people are being really short-sighted about it. Obviously the iPad is a different use case as you point out and isn't going anywhere, I think that's good as consumers define what they want/expect.

The old 1 GB = 1000MB instead of 1024MB marketing trick reduces usable space to ~119GB even before you start subtracting the OS space.

It's not a trick. Giga = 10^9 for 100% of everything except memory. Bandwidth, Disk Space are measured in SI units.

Memory too. There's a difference between GiB (power of 2) and GB (power of 10).

I believe his point is that memory manufacturers advertised 1GB of RAM which is actually 1GiB. So for advertised memory, 1GB = 1024MB.

Fair point, I agree that the proper terminology, it should be GiB to be explicit. I was just trying to point out, that the only time you should ever consider GB might mean 2^30 is with memory (and it usually does with memory). You should always assume that GB means 10^9 in all other scenarios. Bandwidth, Disk Space - GB always means 10^9.

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