When people buy a laptop they expect the OS will take up a good chunk of the storage space. When people buy a tablet they don't have that expectation.
More importantly, when the free space is significantly less than half the advertized storage and there is no warning that's the case people are going to be surprized and upset, and rightfully so.
In a Macbook Air the worst you get is a reduction to about 70-75% of the listed storage capacity (in the 128 or 64 gb models), which is annoying but not crazy. In the Surface Pro 64 model you are reduced to about 1/3 of the initial capacity, which is ridiculous and definitely deserves some sort of warning on the packaging, I would think. Expecting a reduction by 1/4 is reasonable common sense, experiencing a reduction by 2/3 is surprising.
I disagree, desktops and tablets should advertise their usable space. The true drive space should still be available on the spec sheet, but usable space should be the main highlight.
Disk space has a history of misleading sizing, with 1 "MB" often meaning 1000 KiB, and 1 "GB" seeming to mean any combination of decimal and binary multipliers between 1GB and 1GiB (Including 1000 "MB", which might itself be something between 1 MB and 1 MiB).
Given that mess, I can't see the marketeers taking the trouble to distinguish between total and free space. The first company to honestly advertise the space on their device in the manner you describe will miss out on sales due to poorly written (or poorly understood) comparison tables.
And home broadband providers should advertise their contention rates. And, if that starter is free with the main course, I'll just have the starter free on its own please.
Can I add to that and say that the device should also carry a price tag that reflects what will come out my pocket. That happens where I live, but I went to San Francisco recently and when buying found that the price tag excludes tax. What? What's the price tag for then? Make the writing on the label reflect what I give and what I get.
Unfortunately, not displaying the customer's actual cost until the point of purchase is an annoying Americanism that applies to almost every financial transaction.
As an American consumer, I don't find this confusing; taxes change even among individual small cities, and they can change multiple times per year. The taxes really have nothing to do with my actual purchase: it feels more like a payment processing fee, a "cost of living". Yes: I realize that as a non-American consumer this sounds insane. People have different expectations and subtle details can change opinions; I pretty much never hear an American complaining, however, that they didn't realize there was a tax on something.
Surely there is an advantage in being the company that says $100. No additional taxes, no add ons, no surprises. Plenty of companies here and in other countries keep retail costs flat across a market despite the cost of a sale fluctuating. Maybe I ask too much.
Sure, but with USB 3.0 getting similar speeds to the internal SSD (according to Anandtech) I can add another 64gb to my surface pro for 30 bucks! Try doing that on an iPad.
Well sure, except 1) I don't need to because iOS doesn't waste as much space; and 2) That's a whole separate partition with a separate set of data to manage/lose, and a new USB drive to have sticking out of your Surface all the time, unplugging and putting away when you pack it up and pulling it out and plugging it in when you're looking to do work.
Personally, I wouldn't want a 'tablet' with a USB drive sticking out two inches all the time.
There are plenty of reasons, but the question is whether or not they are good reasons.
A Windows install, for example, will have lots of pre-cached drivers, a crap-ton of little utility programs, several pre-installed libraries and frameworks (.net, vb6, etc.), and a VM for running 32-bit apps. All of these things provide valuable features for the OS.
Now, on top of that there is certainly plenty of bloat, and in many instances linux has simply approached these same problems differently. For example by installing shared libraries on demand via the internet through a package management system, or by simply having poorer hardware and cross-architecture support (zing!), or by having a vast ecosystem of open source tools available so that it's always possible to install something via a native compilation. Those are good choices for the linux way of doing things but they certainly come with tradeoffs.
P.S. Linux should be installable on the Surface Pro, so if the hardware intrigues anyone it might be worthwhile to see how it fares with a different OS.
Ever tried getting word docs into Indesign without converting to RTF as an interim step? This may not be a MS problem and may be Adobes fault, but whenever I get a .doc, importing into indesign directly makes my life miserable for too often. Even if it doesn't crash Indesign, it often causes strange behaviour and bizarre formatting issues.
Between that and the damn paper clip wizard man of old, my Office suite tolerance is about zero.
But LibreOffice, ouch. After this last week, one more 'java update required' popup and I might start crying. I DID IT 1 MINUTE AGO.
I've no skin in this. To be honest its an article by someone that has a track record for being economic with facts and it's on ZDnet, which is good enough reason to ignore it. However I don't see so much "fanboys" (please don't, it's childish), as people desperately trying to prove the authors point. I'd suggest at this stage and as a neutral the exact opposite is the case.
You're wrong. Ed Bott has a track record of being very accurate with the facts.
You are, of course, welcome to produce some bulletproof factual examples (since you have just shown your opinions are not worth anything) to prove otherwise.
Calm down. He has been paid by Microsoft in the past so his opinions are hardly partisan and being economic with facts means that he often tells half a story, generally Microsofts. Like I said, I don't care either way, what I do care about is needless name calling and veiled ad hominems.
You mean, I should stand idly by while you casually malign the integrity of a good journalist? Sorry, I'm calling you out for bullshit. So far you score highly for innuendo and zero for producing any substantial facts or other concrete evidence.
Nice page, but I don't think _Simon realises he made an ad hominem attack on Ed Bott and ZDNet. _Simon's language is rather vague ("needless name calling" -- where exactly?) and sloppy (its where he means it's; "hardly partisan" - what does he think he means?), so his command of English may be part of his problem.
Either way, based on long experience, I always suspect that anyone who says "To be honest" really means "I am just about to lie".
Wow. Arrogant much? The truth is that you are not really interested in actually discussing the facts. Ed Bott was paid by Microsoft to promote Windows 7 in his blog back in 2008. His views are not partisan and his articles as a result are meritless. He, in simple words just for you, is biased in favor of Microsoft. ZDNet, much like other online IT tabloids like The Register, habitually publish nothing but trash that is designed for the sole purpose of advertising views. That this and other similar stories have recently featured so prominently has set alarm bells ringing.
To be honest, I really don't care what you think because so far you've done nothing but troll me. Using "sloppy" spelling as a reason to discredit what I said as well as calling me a liar? Come on, you surely can do better than that!
The truth is that you have yet to provide any facts to back up your smearing of Ed Bott and ZDNet.
> "His views are not partisan"
As I pointed out before, you have problems understanding and/or using the English language. Partisan means "an adherent or supporter of a person, group, party, or cause, especially a person who shows a biased, emotional allegiance."
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/partisan
Now, the gist of your unsupported attack on Bott is that he is partisan, but you keep saying he is "not partisan".
See what I did there? I pointed out your mistake, and I supported it with independent factual evidence. If you want to take part in a grown up conversation, you should learn to do the same.
> "I really don't care what you think because so far you've done nothing but troll me."
Again, you obviously don't have a clue what trolling is. However, I reckon you can probably use Google to figure it out. Calling you out for bullshit is not trolling.
I have previously pointed out that you are attacking someone without producing any evidence, but you continually resort to ad hominem attacks (calling me a troll is another ad hominem attack, following your ad hominem attack on Bott).
You claim to be against ad hominem attacks and name calling (see above) but this is exactly what you are doing! This fits perfectly with the strategy of using the word "honest" when you are being dishonest.
Still, you can prove you are honest pretty easily, as follows....
Show us some evidence that you have a clue what you are talking about. Bott posts evidence of his expertise and (very high) professional standing, and I linked to that above. Where is yours?
Next, produce the evidence that Bott was "paid by Microsoft", and under what circumstances.
If you can't support your claim with evidence then, sadly, nobody has any alternative but to decide that you are a liar. It's not just me. Rational people want to hear rational arguments based on checkable facts. That's not too much to ask of you, is it?
> "The truth is that you are not really interested in actually discussing the facts."
Another ad hominem attack on me that attempts to divert the discussion away from the point. The truth is that I keep asking you for facts and you have not provided any. None.
So, are you going to keep posting bullshit replies? It might not be a wisest approach. As it is (and this is a factual observation) you're just making yourself look stupid.
Possibly, but that claim is false. On the 64GB Surface Pro, the fraction should be 1/2, if the calculation is done in decimal (billions of) bytes.
As with the MacBook Air and other systems, the 64GB or 128GB (decimal) that is advertised only comes to 59GB or 119GB of real (binary) space.
If you are still naive enough to think that buying a 128GB PC or drive gets you 128GB of usable binary file space then your calculation cannot possibly be correct.
Note, I'm not saying that 1/2 is good, merely that 1/3 is wrong.
When people buy a laptop they expect the OS will take up a good chunk of the storage space. When people buy a tablet they don't have that expectation.
More importantly, when the free space is significantly less than half the advertized storage and there is no warning that's the case people are going to be surprized and upset, and rightfully so.
In a Macbook Air the worst you get is a reduction to about 70-75% of the listed storage capacity (in the 128 or 64 gb models), which is annoying but not crazy. In the Surface Pro 64 model you are reduced to about 1/3 of the initial capacity, which is ridiculous and definitely deserves some sort of warning on the packaging, I would think. Expecting a reduction by 1/4 is reasonable common sense, experiencing a reduction by 2/3 is surprising.