Linked by Howard Fosdick on Fri 16th Nov 2012 07:43 UTC
A California man is suing Microsoft, alledging that his Surface tablet did not provide the advertised amount of disk space. The 32G device has 16G of space for users, as the operating system uses the other 16G. The 64G Surface leaves 45G free for users. The case will turn on whether Microsoft has clearly explained to customers how much free space the Surface leaves for their use outside of the OS. How much disk space does your OS consume?
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We're all computer-literate people who know that an operating system takes up space, and that 32 gigabytes is the maximum capacity of the drive completely empty. (gigabytes, not gibibytes). Once you put a filesystem on it, you've lost some space. Put an operating system on it and you've lost more space.
People who are not as computer-literate as us will not know. They usually don't notice because the amount of space lost is so low when expressed as a percentage of the total capacity.
In other words, who notices 16 gigabytes lost on a 1TB hard disk?
Microsoft has released a tablet with an advertised "32 gigabyte" disk/SSD. It would be reasonable to expect maybe 25 gigabytes of usable space after the OS has been installed. However, there's only 16 gigabytes left after the OS - that's literally 50% of the advertised capacity lost!
Now, if you bought a computer with a 1TB hard disk, and found Windows taking up 500 gigs of that, you'd be pretty pissed too! You've lost half your storage space!
So no, it's not just Microsoft-hate; advertising twice as much storage space as what is actually usable is drastic misadvertising.