Here is the typical HP blurb about hard drive space (and as far as Surface Pro is concerned that SSD is a "hard drive")
"Actual formatted capacity is less. A portion of the hard drive is reserved for system recovery software — for notebooks up to: 30GB (Windows 8 & Windows 7), 12GB (MCE); for desktops up to: 30GB (Windows 8), 14GB (Windows 7), 12GB (MCE). For hard drives 1GB=1 billion bytes. " [1]
When is the last time you bought a windows Laptop with less than a 80GB hard drive in it? What was your user experience with that?
Somehow, people seem to thing that the Surface Pro is something other than Win8 but it isn't. It's a laptop with an optional keyboard and a touch screen. It is Microsoft's "take" on the Tablet experience. It is a mashup of legacy code and modern product design. It's an unattractive date with an interest in entomology.
It's a Macbook Air competitor, not an iPad competitor, the Air btw contains this warning for the 64GB model [2] : "1. 1GB=1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less." How much less? They don't even say. But it would be fun to find out.
The 'bug' here is that Hard Drives got super big super quick and nobody back in product management got the memo that SSDs were the new hawtness so trim the fat.
[1] http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Lapt...
[2] http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...
EDIT: its -> it's
So, it sounds like the 64 GB MacBook Air is a much better deal by both being a better thought out machine and having more usable storage space.
Ding, Ding, Ding. Give the man a prize. Yes it is, and that is a problem for Microsoft.
The circle is complete, and we can offer Marco an alternative blog post which goes ...
"I was amazed to discover how little space was available to the user of the Surface Pro 64GB model. Here, here, and here there are discussions of all the things that are pre-allocated from the SSD. Now it is running a full copy of Windows 8, so all of the OS features are available, but lets compare it to the Macbook Air, a machine with a similar price point and similar computational capability. It leaves Y% of the SSD available and its running Apple's laptop OS MacOS 10. Etc, etc."
Perhaps that one will come later. Helps educate the consumer and provides some feedback to Microsoft.
Of course it runs office. And with VMWare or VirtualBox or Parallels...every badly written legacy app is alive and well.
You don't in fact get as much capability even if you buy both a MacBook Air and an iPad for much more money. Especially after you've paid for Parallels and a copy of Windows 7 as well ;-)
As for the people who haven't quite figured out that you can keep a lot of your files in the cloud (and create them using Microsoft Office in the cloud), the cheap solution to the "storage problem" is as simple as a microSD card and a bit of copying.
Yes,it would be much nicer to have a 512GB Flash drive built in, but very few people would be willing to pay the price.
I would have thought the 64GB Surface Pro would be enough storage for me, but if it only has 23GB usable I would need to upgrade to the 128GB model. I've wanted a Surface Pro since the original announcement, but have been really struggling to come up with any good reasons to buy one.
I was referring to iP(ho/o/a)(d/ne)s at 2/4/8/16/32GB, losing a decent percentage, without this type of outcry. Sealed devices, marketed on HD size.
I wiped Xandros, installed what was called Eee Ubuntu (now Easy Peasy) and never looked back (though I since got a bigger SSD, maxed it out on RAM, and happily run Bodhi Linux)--but I can only imagine the wrath of someone who bought one and didn't know that was an option, especially one bought as a gift. I had to wonder whether it was set up to fail.
But there is one huge difference you have overlooked - with your 486 you could install any operating system you wanted. You could even delete bits of DOS you didn't use. With the Apple/Microsoft tablets you can only run the operating system they provide (cryptographically/hardware enforced) and you cannot delete any of the OS.
With that 20MB 486 you could choose what every single byte is used for - and that is true of PCs today. But not for the locked down hardware.
That doesn't mean it's right of course - space post-os would be a great spec to have. Also a motivation for more people to question why. A lot of the overhead (CPU, ram and long term storage) on a regular computer or phone is there for good reasons, but I would venture to say the majority of "no-load load" is questionable at best.
Recently my friend said that he considers buying a tablet and thinking about a Win8 tablet.
He already owns two quite new laptops. So I asked why he needs a Win8 tablet which main feature is the ability to run desktop apps? If you want a tablet then buy a tablet which has apps designed for tablets.
It doesn't really matter what they're going to do, running actual Windows apps is one of the only major selling points of the Surface Pro (along with performance and the pressure-sensitive pen).
Bingo! - Quality in both Software and Hardware.
And, inside the box, lo behold, is a 64GB hard disk.
Edit: The Nexus 4 8GB only has 5GB of free storage and has no means of extending the storage though a MicroSD or anything else.
There are numbers and there are numbers right?
This is a roundabout way of saying that Microsoft has a problem on its hands.
Also, if you look at it in terms of dollars and cents, Apple prices their iPads more or less based upon storage so you're looking at a situation where consumers are legitimately making different decisions due to this problem. In other words, a 32GB iPad and a 64GB surface pro are comparable in capabilities whereas a 64gb iPad provides much more storage than the surface. The investment Apple made in reducing the footprint of the OS is basically not being taken into account in pricing.