Marco Arment: "Everyone should play by the same rules. A proposal: storage capacities referenced or implied in the names or advertisements for personal computers, tablets, and smartphones should not exceed the amount of space available for end-user installation of third-party applications and data, after enough software has been installed to enable all commonly advertised functionality. With today's OSes, iPads could advertise capacities no larger than 12, 28, 60, and 124 GB and the Surface Pros could be named 23 and 83 GB." Wholly agreed. When I buy a box of 100 staples, I expect it to contain ~100 staples - not 50 because the other 50 are holding the box together.
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Member since:2011-05-12
I guess it would it make less easier and memory the OS doesn't use it wasted yet you paid for it. Also I don't think it would make things smaller, bigger probably which isn't cool for companies that make stuff as thin as possible.
IIRC iOS does have a separate OS partition, but it's just part of the total memory.
In general this all wasn't such a big deal, but Microsoft Surface made a huge gap between total and available storage memory.
Member since:2006-07-18
Easier or not is not a question here. If I, lowly software engineer, can install a second drive, partition it, choose where and how to install OS, I highly doubt that Microsoft, Google, [insert company name here] cannot automate this process.
Now your argument might, *might*, apply to smartphones, etc. Even then when device is engineered they know which parts they are going to use, what OS they are going to install. Splitting that space for dedicated usage is the easy part. How to sell that device - that is the question, and thus far it seems that the easiest way is to lie to the consumers.
You are saying that consumers should be aware of this misinformatio, why should he/she? At the end you will get the available space, right? So why lie and frustrate people who might choose to avoid future products of the said company.
My point is that if something is wrong and everybody are used to that wrong, should it stay that way or would you rather do something about it?
Edited 2013-01-30 11:34 UTC
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Member since:
2006-07-18
So why don't they do what you suggested in the first place: have different storage space for system and user data. It's not that partitions were invented yesterday, right? Why not put two separate flash chips instead of one? They would be smaller than one big, presumably cheaper too. This way there would be no confusion, user uses user (too many users...) space which size wouldn't depend on any update size, new OS version size, etc.