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.
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 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.
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.
That's not really relevant to the legitimacy of the current argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
I have bought plenty of devices and never have I had any of them present me with only 36% of the advertised storage space.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, not seeing any such number on Apple's or Google's store. How many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes. Expensively. In time and money. Maybe there's room for improvement?
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
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.
Or was it your experience that every time they got a new machine they would complain "Wow, they did it again!" ?
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.
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?
The game is simple, there will be associated with a device a numerically significant value. It may be the "version" number, the "memory" number, the "speed" number, the "users" number, but its a number. And two or more apparently identical devices will obey the rule that the bigger numbers are the "better" devices and the smaller numbers are the "less good" devices.
There are two rules that seem to be true in this game;
1) The numbers for the same manufacture will determine which is the better version of the product.
2) When competitors use the same "sort" of numbers, the numbers will be set up to have you compare the products that the competitors want you compare, not necessarily equivalent products.
When Tegra 3 tablets came out and "number of cores" became a thing, Apple started counting everything they could as a core. With storage people use the biggest number they can, with 100GB disk drives really having 95 x 2^20 bytes of storage in them. But hey, 100 sounds better than 95 and 'G' means a billion right? Right!
In the case of storage the 'base' foot print is fixed, so its 64% of a 64G drive, and 35% of a 128GB drive, and 17% of a 256G drive etc etc etc.
Sure its amazing how 'fat' the base OS is on a Surface pro, but since a 256GB SSD today costs the same as an 8GB SSD cost when Windows XP was in vogue (and fits in a smaller footprint if you use mSATA what does it matter?
If it is extremely bad then it means there is room for disruption, a lightweight OS that does all of that and gives you more of the storage. But call out the feds? (the FTC call for action in Marco's post) really?