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I read your comment here with ever-growing puzzlement.

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.

Except when Apple decides that there is no need to have a SD slot, and thou shall use iTunes and iCloud to cover all of your needs.

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 takes up 50 GB, 100 GB or 500 GB, that's Microsoft's problem. They shouldn't pass it on to the consumer, and they shouldn't advertise a device as a 100 GB device, if only 50 GB is available to the user.

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.

This is absolutely not practical, for reasons that you probably know. And the "already paying for the software, so they shouldn't pay for the hardware" bit makes no sense.

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.

> Marco would write another rant about how MS does not understand the mobile market

That's not really relevant to the legitimacy of the current argument.

The thing is, I'm too fucking tired of these "arguments". All of these arguments are totally pointless.

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.

But you're not getting short changed. You're getting exactly what you paid for. It has a 64GB drive, this is fact. It has 23GB free. This is fact. That's exactly what you paid for. It's standard procedure in computing to list the spec for the hardware without taking into consideration the use of the hardware. When I go to Best Buy and buy a desktop with a 500GB drive, they call it a 500GB drive and not a 450GB drive, even though 50GB of it may be already in use by the OS and the crapware preinstalled.

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.

Users currently look at the 64GB number as a rough approximation of how much music/files/apps they can store on that device. Maybe they are wrong to do that, but that's the current intuitive assumption for Jane Doe buying an iPod. So with that assumption, they are certainly not getting what the box tells them.

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.

But you're not getting short changed.

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.

So how many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought? How many OS upgrades have you gone through?

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 :-)

"So how many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought?"

I have bought plenty of devices and never have I had any of them present me with only 36% of the advertised storage space.

That's great, was that accidental or intentional? Have you ever had the experience where you shopped for a device and checked to see how much storage was available? And then adjusted your buying preference based on the answer to that question?

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.

> seek out the available space number

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.

Yes I do, I think everyone I know does this, but I can't speak for them. These days I shop a lot online but when I wanted to see what the windows 8 "load" was I went over to Fry's opened up explorer on their laptop and right clicked on Properties to see how much space was available vs equipped. (I ended up getting a Win7P laptop but I had done that too with Win7). Opening up the 'software' center in control panel you can scroll down and see how much space each package is using. I also took my current Debian/Ubuntu mashup distro and ran through the apt database to see how much I would need in a second partition to co-boot it and windows, and then compared prices for the stuff equipped with my required size drive (given that) and the smallest available drive. Ended up buying the smallest available (120GB) pulling it and putting in a 500GB drive, and selling the 120GB drive for a net cost about 10% more than the cheaper drive.

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?

> 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?

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.

If I am going to be expected to put that much effort into a computer, I am just going to go in for the penny, in for the pound and install linux.

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.

So you think this is ok because "people should know because they should have been burned by this before"?

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.

>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.

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?

And Microsoft doesn't go out of the way any more than any other company at "hiding" that information from you.

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.

> 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.

Yeah, not seeing any such number on Apple's or Google's store. How many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought?

>>The storage spec matters.

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.

You're going to have to do better than vague remembrances to make that point compelling.

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.

They are silly because the tech industry trains people about the specsmanship game early on

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?

I certainly agree with your last comment about WTF.

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.

It is a huge marketing issue. Consumers will get news of this and think that they are being taken for a ride. Even if it is true or not, they will believe the websites that are calling foul. Its not really about the actual specs, but about the market perception of the product. Having 23GB avaliable from 64GB makes people think that this gadget is a bloated and slow piece of shit. That's how people think. Don't matter if its nicer than the Apple or Androif offerings.

> When Tegra 3 tablets came out and "number of cores" became a thing, Apple started counting everything they could as a core.

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.

> "They are silly because the tech industry trains people about the specsmanship game early on"

Yes. Expensively. In time and money. Maybe there's room for improvement?

The game is simple, there will be associated with a device a numerically significant value.

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

Especially when it was popular on various forums a few months ago to rag on the iPad and various price points for still shipping with 16GB when the Surface was shipping with 64GB. It takes a lot of wind out of those sails when it ships with 64GB only because it has to, not because it provides a much better cost:storage ratio.

"It's even simpler, when MS says 64GB, I'd wager that most people expect to have about 64GB free to fill."

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.

I would bet a majority of the people who buy PC's think the HDD space listed is what's available to them. I worked at a help desk in college and it was a frequent complaint among users that their hard drive shows less available than what the box said when helping them set up their computer. Your average user isn't going to think about OS size.

I think you make my point. So did the same student complain more than once about their misunderstanding of what was stated versus what they got? I'm sure you explained to them that the OS and other things took up space and that came out of the one hard drive in the system. And I would guess that they understood that explanation, and then when they made future purchases they would "expect" that some of the space was taken up by OS and other things and perhaps, if they were careful shoppers, they would read through the foot note to figure out exactly how much before they bought it.

Or was it your experience that every time they got a new machine they would complain "Wow, they did it again!" ?

Obviously those people would not be surprised in the future with a similar purchase. If those same students would go and buy a Surface Tablet, I'd be willing to bet that they would be upset about the lack of "free space", especially the amount that is described in the above post.

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.

That's an absurd argument. Because it's not likely to fool someone twice, it shouldn't matter that it's obviously deceptive?

Hmm, I think if you want to contest the reasoning you need a definition of 'obviously deceptive' that we can agree on.

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?

Do you have any idea what a vanishingly small percentage of "Microsoft Customers" have ever installed any version of Windows themselves?

You can't seriously compare this with the HDD situation, where the term "gigabyte" has two meanings.