Posters here comparing it to traditional "space inflation" on drives are missing the point. The difference here is the magnitude. On the box you are told you have 64GB and you end up having only a third of that to use. There's a fuzzy line somewhere and it really feels like this is on the wrong side of it.<p>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.
Anyone defending this is being disingenuous.<p>Having ~66% of the storage already used out of the box is nuts and most people would be rightly annoyed and frustrated to find this out after buying one.<p>The correct thing for Microsoft to have done in this situation is NOT release a 64GB model, if they were unable to free up more space.
Regarding FTC action, it's worth noting that MS's page on the Surface Pro (<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-8-pro/home" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-...</a>) includes this small print: <i>System software uses significant storage space; your storage capacity will be less.</i> I freely admit ignorance of the law but to a layman it seems like they've covered themselves pretty well here. I would be curious to know what impact this would have on potential FTC action.<p>Further, I wonder how easily the "recovery partition" can be disabled and how much space a user could recover. How much is OS and how much is "recovery partition"?
Anyone running Windows instances on EC2 will tell you that a 30 GB EBS partition only gives you around 10 GB of usable space. Windows takes up a lot of space (15 GB for 32-bit and 20 GB for 64-bit) even before apps get involved.<p>I remember when the original iPhone debuted, I was completely SHOCKED that Apple was able to reduce the footprint of OS X so dramatically. A 8 GB phone still gave you 6.5 GB of free space. Then with the release of Snow Leopard, Apple more than halved the size of the space required to install OS X.
I tend to find these sorts of arguments silly. They are silly because the tech industry trains people about the specsmanship game early on, generally people learn the game after buying one, or at most two technology products.<p>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.<p>There are two rules that seem to be true in this game;<p>1) The numbers for the same manufacture will determine which is the better version of the product.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?
When I installed Windows 8 a few weeks ago, the 64-bit install was about 20GB so where the hell is the other 21GB going?<p>Is the recovery partition literally a mirror image of the default install? That sounds ridiculous because the thing is basically a computer so could have a USB-restore, but I don't see how they get to 40GB+ otherwise.<p><facetious>21GB of trials and time-limited software? </facetious>
Reminds me of the common shock when an european travels to North America and finds out that restaurant listed prices do not include taxes nor (massive in comparison) tips.<p>It's all storage and it's a valid measure, especially if you consider that perhaps some stuff can be uninstalled to make more room. In practice, whoever cares about the exact amount of free space will find out, and whoever doesn't will just use the numbers to label same-kind devices as 'bigger' and 'smaller'. Comparing numbers from different types of devices is as meaningful as comparing version numbers from competing software products.
Wow, Microsoft definitely deserves some kind of award for this. Shipping a tablet, with own hardware design no less, with a 41GB OS is certainly an achievement not every company can accomplish. (sorry I'm just baffled how you can fill up 41GB)
Wow.<p>Anyone who actively refuses to buy an Apple or Android tablet in favor of one of these overpriced monstrosities is 100% cutting off their nose to spite their face. I just can't even begin to fathom why Microsoft would go out of their way to cater to such an infinitesimal group of people who feel that a laptop is not portable enough, yet need the full functionality of god-knows-what program that probably doesn't even work properly with Windows 8.
Does Microsoft disclose the usable space on their devices before purchase? If so, then I really don't see the problem. The device has a 64GB flash chip, and that's what the advertising says. All devices use some portion of their advertised space out of the box, so if you want to draw an arbitrary line and save customers 15 seconds of research before buying their expensive electronic device, I guess that's your prerogative.
Why don't they just sell it as 20 gigs?<p>By promising 64 gb, they are just asking for trouble. Nobody is going to buy it (the lie and product).<p>It's that or lower the foot print of the OS.
The best line of the article<p><pre><code> If those numbers don’t sound as good, or the
manufacturers don’t leave themselves any room for OS-
update expansion without changing the names of their
products mid-cycle, that’s their problem to solve, not
ours.
</code></pre>
The argument my Marco is simple really - walk the talk.
While I get that Windows + pre-installed apps + recovery partition takes up space. When I saw that only 23GB is left after a 64GB capacity, I was shocked.<p>Compare this to iOS or Android and you'll find it's going against my expectation. I doubt I'm alone. 23GB is not a lot of space these days if you plan to use it for something serious.
The way people are reacting to this reminds me of the initial reaction to Macs ditching the floppy drive or the optical drive.<p>Surface has a fully functional USB port, and Windows 8 supports a bunch of cloud-driven integration out of the box. More and more, I've been moving my important documents online (with the exception of raw audio & video files, which are still too large to bother hosting online right now) If you want more storage, slap an external drive on your Surface.<p>That said, I can't argue that advertising it as a 64gb tablet is any more sensible than Ticketmaster advertising $15 tickets, only to charge you $10 in handling fees when you actually make the purchase. It's not straightforward, and comes off as misleading.
But I can't help but thing... What kind of operating system is FORTY ONE GIGABYTES?! My C:\Windows is 20GB, that seems excessive already, and I know for a fact it was originally much smaller. What the hell are Microsoft putting on these things?!
The point about how you market size is the least interesting part of this.<p>My question is why the the hell is Microsoft shipping such a pig of a mobile OS?
Not surprised. Windows in general is extremely inefficient with disk space. It keeps multiple copies of every patch and system dll under the Windows folder for defensive purposes.
Recent releases have added "restore points", winsxs, csc, and SoftwareDistribution\downloads, to the original dllcache.<p>I'm not joking when I say you can easily free up 10GB+ on an installation that has been around a while; 100GB if a service pack has been installed. And it only grows unless you actively manage it.<p>This is the shitty design these NT based tablets are facing. It could probably be solved by moving all this crap out of the system folder and into its own folder with an expiration date.
The difference between Microsoft and Apple: Apple would never have had the 64 GB one, because of this issue. They would just have the bigger drive, and charge more money for it.
Ignoring the dumb FTC idea, the 64GB Surface Pro does seem like an oddly pointless device. I can't imagine people shelling out for this relatively expensive PC would find it a good deal to save 10% off the price to have a cripplingly limited storage budget, or to use up the SDXC slot on a drive almost as expensive as the price differential.<p>For MS, I can't imagine it'll be worth the bad PR to be able to advertise a $899 starting price instead of $999.
The moral of this story is not to buy the 64 GB Surface Pro. Hopefully Microsoft will get the message and either reduce the footprint of the OS or only ship 128 GB and above Surface Pros.<p>There is a perfect market solution to this. Don't buy it. Now that I know that the OS takes up an insane amount of space, I have no interest in this product.
Another issue this raises is the likely hood of most to all free space being used up and the impact this will have on the life and performance of the SSD and the Surface Pro is a whole.<p>Do we know the specs of the SSD? What controller type it's using? TRIM support?
My car has 75 cubic units of space. But 50 units of that are taken up by the engine, dashboard, heater, steering wheel, door panels, insulation matting, seats, spare tire, etc. So there's only 25 cubic units left for people and carrying.<p>But sure, 75 cubic units.
The odd thing is that Windows 8 minimum disk requirements are only 20 GB.
<a href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/system-requirements" rel="nofollow">http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/system-requirem...</a><p>(It's also interesting to see Marco try to nuance this post. All the Mac pundits have been posting it as a "haha, stupid Microsoft" which is probably why it came to his attention, but he tried to write his blog post in a generic way, that this is a problem with all of these devices.)
But the Surface Pro DOES have 64GB of memory,right?
If it does,then your argument is invalid. It might need to ue 41GB for the system,but the name is absolutely correct.
So basically marco assumes a standard that punishes bundling? A windows 8 tablet that comes bundled with a full office suite needs to advertise itself as 5-10GB smaller than the identically configured but less functional tablet without the bundle? Using 66% of shipped free space on a 64GB tablet is clearly wrong, but you can say that without coming up with some synthetic standard that nobody will ever follow.
So recovery takes at least 12GB of those 64? I would like the option to transfer it to a thumbdrive or an extHDD and get all that space back.<p>Still that leaves about 29GB for the windows install, and that TBH is a bit insane, 29 for an OS? even if it comes with Office thats just too much.
In a couple of years this will be unimportant as SSD drives grow in size (and not in price). We've seen this over and over with every new storage media.<p>Microsoft might want to do some trimming there but I wouldn't spent all my time on that.
I'm running Win8 Pro on my laptop. The OS weighs in at about 25GB which means the rest of the bloat comes from the pre-installed apps. Can they be removed?
iOS isn't MacOS but Windows 8 is just another Windows! The inefficient disk space usage is quite infamous with Windows. They managed to fit the physical memory by memory combining but failed how to manage the files on storage.<p>Don't be surprised it's Microsoft!<p>They did physical memory compression but forgot how to optimize it well on the dedicated storage.
It's being advertised as coming with 64GB of storage, not with "64GB free". That's a huge difference.<p>You can wipe the hard disk, install Damn Small Linux, and get ~64GB of free storage.<p>The FTC should consider taking action? What? Why does Marco seem to lose all sense of perspective when it's Apple vs. competition?
Says microsoft in their announcement:<p>> "Surface Pro has a USB 3.0 port for connectivity with almost limitless storage options, including external hard drives and USB flash drives"<p>Translation: "For the sake of portability ..."<p>> "Customers can also free up additional storage space by creating a backup bootable USB and deleting the recovery partition"<p>Translation: "... and for the sake of simplicity ..."<p>> "Surface also comes pre-loaded with SkyDrive, allowing you to store up to 7GB of content in the cloud for free"<p>Translation: "... and because we've always poo-pooed Google when it came to the usefulness of their Chromebooks without an Internet connection ..."<p>"... we are proud to present to you ... surface pro!!!"
This is actually institutional for Microsoft. Years ago, when I was developing using Visual Studio and it came on a set of CDs, I saw an article claiming that installing it and MSDN (their offline help system of tech notes since the dawn of time) made you feel like Godzilla had shit on your hard drive.<p>It took up an outrageous amount of storage. The same was true for shrink-wrapped Office.
Original source is here[1] instead of the blogspam by Marco.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/29/3929110/surface-pro-disk-space-windows-8" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/29/3929110/surface-pro-disk-s...</a>