Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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