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: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
Member since:2011-05-12
I don't think it's telling lies and it should be common knowledge that you have less space to use than the total advertised capacity.
Personally I'd prefer if a device has amount X of memory or storage it should be stated at such. Of course I agree it suck when a device with 16 GB can't hold 14-15 GB of data, even though it's less than the total amount.
But does it improve the situation if you sold such a device, 16 GB, as a 12 GB one and after an OS update you have 11 left. Or if Microsoft shrinks Windows on Surface you suddenly have more space left.
To be honest, most customers don't really care about bits 'n' bytes. They don't want to know how many GB they will get, but how many movies will fit. Which is an ever harder question to answer!
When Apple came with the iPod they said it would hold 1000 songs. Well, it depends on the size of those songs, it may be more, it may be less. Perhaps that was a lie, but it was certainly good marketing because everybody could mentally picture what 1000 songs meant, it meant a lot. X GB doesn't say anything to most people.
So wether you say a device has 32 GB or 28 GB (out of 32) most people will still ask how many movies or Excel files that translates to.
I guess it's best if people just got themselves informed to prevent disappointments. Read reviews, ask other people, talk to the salesman (not sure if that's really a good idea though).
Even when you do know how much storage you have available once you start installing other applications, of which you have no idea how big they are, that initial value becomes less meaningful. A X GB device can't hold 1000 songs, because is has Office Mobile or something else on it and average customers are bad at guessing how that would impact storage capacity.
All in all for the average customer it's all very tricky and changing the system will make all of us have to deal with two systems, the old and the new one.
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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.