To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
28 GB out of 32 GB as compared to 23 GB out of 64 GB.
Are you seriously saying this is the same?
And, even that. I have an iPhone 4 and right after a factory reset there are more than 28 GB of free space. Apple is just using SI units which shows smaller numbers.
Adrian
"SI-units", which are in fact not standardized for this purpose, are showing higher numbers than binary prefixes.
28 x 10^9 = 26,077 x 2^30
And because theverge, the at the moment only source of information, mixed the prefixes also last time, when they reported about diskspace usage of Windows RT, I would suspect that they did mix it up again :-)
And finally there are other tablets and convertibles with Windows 8 already available on the market (by Samsung, Sony and others), using 64 Gb and 128 GB SSDs, so the news aren't really news.
Edited 2013-01-30 19:45 UTC
Yes it has to do with the fact that iOS still reports storage in binary base whereas OS X switched to the decimal system a couple of years ago.
$ gb used as opposed to 41 gb. For your example, that breaks down to:
32 gb iPhone: 12.5% of space used, btw a good chunk of that is simply filesystem overhead and other formatting, not to mention the 1024 vs 1000 byte marketing tactic.
Surface Pro: 64% of the disk space used and, while roughly the same amount as the iPhone goes to filesystem overhead not to mention the same marketing tactics as above, that's certainly not true for the rest of the used space. This is false marketing, pure and simple because, at the $899 entry price, no one would ever buy a tablet marketed as having 23 gb of useable space. That would expose it as the rip-off that it is.
"a good chunk of that is simply filesystem overhead and other formatting"
Filesystem overhead and formatting is simple speak for the difference between decimal and binary storage capacities. Formatting uses almost no disk space, and there is no such thing as "filesystem overhead". Do the maths and you'll find that your formatted hard drive has almost exactly the capacity in Windows (the OSX thing is new to me so can't comment) as the manufacturer specified, except the manufacturer wrote something like "1 GB = 1 billion bytes" on the box but Microsoft coded it as 1024*1024*1024 bytes which is a bit different when you get to the TB range.





Member since:
2010-01-28
Microsoft just needs to be clear about the storage allocation.
If you look at your iPhone, you will see that a 32GB phone, really only has about 28GB, after accounting for the space that the iOS image takes up.
It really looks bad here, because Windows 8 Pro takes up so much space, whereas a mobile OS like iOS (or Windows RT or Windows Phone 8, for that matter) takes up a lot less storage space.