Thank you. There is a strong HN bias in this discussion, as a lot of people are throwing their arms up and saying "of course! Software takes up memory!"

For me it's about average customer experience. An average customer with 50GB of music would likely purchase 64GB Surface without hesitation. Coming home and discovering it only fits half their collection crosses a (fuzzy) but very real line from acceptable loss to false advertising. They've made a large sacrifice they didn't know they were making when they purchased it.

If this actually was considered false advertising and manufacturers had to advertise usable space instead of HD space, wouldn't that encourage competition? Who cares if the numbers are ugly, I'd be able to evaluate storage as a metric for purchase much more honestly. If something has a 64GB hard drive and only 23GB are available, the number 64 means literally nothing to the average consumer.