3 ms·

I read your comment here with ever-growing puzzlement. The storage spec matters. It's the only spec that truly makes a day-to-day difference in the lives of mo

I read your comment here with ever-growing puzzlement. The storage spec matters. It's the only spec that truly makes a day-to-day difference in the lives of most users, since it provides an upper bound on the portability of their data. The less storage you have, the fewer varieties of "complete" libraries of your content you can carry around. Less storage means making tradeoffs like not having your whole music library when you travel, since you really need space for movies on the plane ride. Not having all your photos, because you need room for some games you feel like playing. Storage space matters every single day. Getting short-changed on it kinda sucks.

enraged_camel 14y ago
>>The storage spec matters. I remember reading a statistic somewhere that said the vast majority of device owners do not fill up the entire storage of the device. So I'm not entirely convinced that it matters at all.
- danilocampos 14y ago
  You're going to have to do better than vague remembrances to make that point compelling. In the age of mobile gaming, apps and content stores, it's absurdly easy even for non-technical users to fill up their devices. I buy that not everyone filled up their 2003 iPod. And that's probably the root of what you're recalling – Apple figured out they could sell a much smaller one and people would still buy. Today is different. Either way, if you're a company selling devices with different tiers of storage, the spec clearly matters to the person making decisions based on that spec.
freehunter 14y ago
But you're not getting short changed. You're getting exactly what you paid for. It has a 64GB drive, this is fact. It has 23GB free. This is fact. That's exactly what you paid for. It's standard procedure in computing to list the spec for the hardware without taking into consideration the use of the hardware. When I go to Best Buy and buy a desktop with a 500GB drive, they call it a 500GB drive and not a 450GB drive, even though 50GB of it may be already in use by the OS and the crapware preinstalled. Yes, storage matters, just like RAM, screen size, and processor speed matters. The fact that you're getting 23GB kinda sucks, but it's a known quantity. You're not being short changed if you receive exactly what you paid for.
- mmatants 14y ago
  Users currently look at the 64GB number as a rough approximation of how much music/files/apps they can store on that device. Maybe they are wrong to do that, but that's the current intuitive assumption for Jane Doe buying an iPod. So with that assumption, they are certainly not getting what the box tells them. The answer could be to e.g. publish a "usable space" amount on the box. Basically, to eliminate this misconception/miscommunication from the customer's mind.
- nodata 14y ago
  But you're not getting short changed. Yes I am. As an unknowledgable consumer, I would never expect two thirds of the advertised space to be unusable. And as an unknowledgable consumer I will never need to know what an OS is, or why it is taking up the advertised space on my shiny new toy, which is quickly looking much less shiny, and in all honesty I am now beginning to dislike and mistrust.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
So how many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought? How many OS upgrades have you gone through? My point is not that storage matters, or doesn't matter, of course it does. My point is that everyone who has bought something with storage has experienced the "comes with X amount of storage (note Y is available for users)" verbiage. And Microsoft doesn't go out of the way any more than any other company at "hiding" that information from you. Neither does Apple, neither does Google. So you read the box/advertisement/review and you gloss over the "storage" number to find the "available storage" number and you see if that will meet your needs, and if not you go to the next higher unit of storage. I totally get that the first time you buy a technology product you might miss that, especially if none of your friends are technology users, but you also probably missed it the first time you bought a car and noted that the mileage values on the window didn't really match up with what you were seeing. Or after you cut the bone out of that 10 lb Ham you bought and only had 6 lbs of Ham left over. It seems like faux outrage to me. Now had Marco gone the other way, public ridicule that it takes 43 freaking Gigabytes to provide a web browser and some apps. Hey I'm all down with that. I mean seriously, I have a multi-user time sharing system for the PDP-8 that runs in 43K words, basically one millionth the space and it includes a FORTRAN compiler. But that the box says one thing and the actual value to the customer is less than that? Not exactly shocking. YMMV :-)
- onli 14y ago
  >My point is that everyone who has bought something with storage has experienced the "comes with X amount of storage (note Y is available for users)" verbiage. There has never been a system I know of which has advertised to have that much space and had so little available, not even relatively. The used space was always almost irrelevant low (be it Windows XP with the hdd available at that time, be it Win 95, heck, even Vista used less - and Android of course, also webOS, behaved better, when going into the mobile space). So - at least if i am not completely mistaken: how should anyone have ever experienced that scam?
- Zirro 14y ago
  "So how many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought?" I have bought plenty of devices and never have I had any of them present me with only 36% of the advertised storage space.
rglullis 14y ago
Except when Apple decides that there is no need to have a SD slot, and thou shall use iTunes and iCloud to cover all of your needs. If Microsoft decided to give a 32GB SD card as a "system rescue solution" to the Surface in order to save disk space, Marco would write another rant about how MS does not understand the mobile market, and no one wants to think about storage specs and oh my iPad is sooo pretty and it just works.
- nextparadigms 14y ago
  If the OS takes up 50 GB, 100 GB or 500 GB, that's Microsoft's problem. They shouldn't pass it on to the consumer, and they shouldn't advertise a device as a 100 GB device, if only 50 GB is available to the user. If the OS does take up 50 GB, then just use a separate, hidden to the user disk, and then add the 100 GB disk or whatever you're advertising. And don't make the user pay for that extra 50 GB you're using for the OS. He's already paying for the Windows license being included in the price.
  - rglullis 14y ago
    This is absolutely not practical, for reasons that you probably know. And the "already paying for the software, so they shouldn't pay for the hardware" bit makes no sense. Bottom line is: MS is juggling a bunch of different plates with Windows 8 which Apple/Google eliminated by design. For this reason, any technical comparison is worthless. The Surface Pro is intended to run everything that runs on any previous versions of Windows, run fast, be light, provide both a keyboard and a touch-friendly interface, be enterprise-ready, and people are complaining about the amount of storage available after the install? On the cheapest version? Some people will always find an excuse to dismiss any and everything that comes out of Redmond. It's unreasonable.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > Marco would write another rant about how MS does not understand the mobile market That's not really relevant to the legitimacy of the current argument.

enraged_camel 14y ago

>>The storage spec matters. I remember reading a statistic somewhere that said the vast majority of device owners do not fill up the entire storage of the device. So I'm not entirely convinced that it matters at all.

danilocampos 14y ago
You're going to have to do better than vague remembrances to make that point compelling. In the age of mobile gaming, apps and content stores, it's absurdly easy even for non-technical users to fill up their devices. I buy that not everyone filled up their 2003 iPod. And that's probably the root of what you're recalling – Apple figured out they could sell a much smaller one and people would still buy. Today is different. Either way, if you're a company selling devices with different tiers of storage, the spec clearly matters to the person making decisions based on that spec.

freehunter 14y ago

But you're not getting short changed. You're getting exactly what you paid for. It has a 64GB drive, this is fact. It has 23GB free. This is fact. That's exactly what you paid for. It's standard procedure in computing to list the spec for the hardware without taking into consideration the use of the hardware. When I go to Best Buy and buy a desktop with a 500GB drive, they call it a 500GB drive and not a 450GB drive, even though 50GB of it may be already in use by the OS and the crapware preinstalled. Yes, storage matters, just like RAM, screen size, and processor speed matters. The fact that you're getting 23GB kinda sucks, but it's a known quantity. You're not being short changed if you receive exactly what you paid for.

mmatants 14y ago
Users currently look at the 64GB number as a rough approximation of how much music/files/apps they can store on that device. Maybe they are wrong to do that, but that's the current intuitive assumption for Jane Doe buying an iPod. So with that assumption, they are certainly not getting what the box tells them. The answer could be to e.g. publish a "usable space" amount on the box. Basically, to eliminate this misconception/miscommunication from the customer's mind.
nodata 14y ago
But you're not getting short changed. Yes I am. As an unknowledgable consumer, I would never expect two thirds of the advertised space to be unusable. And as an unknowledgable consumer I will never need to know what an OS is, or why it is taking up the advertised space on my shiny new toy, which is quickly looking much less shiny, and in all honesty I am now beginning to dislike and mistrust.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

So how many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought? How many OS upgrades have you gone through? My point is not that storage matters, or doesn't matter, of course it does. My point is that everyone who has bought something with storage has experienced the "comes with X amount of storage (note Y is available for users)" verbiage. And Microsoft doesn't go out of the way any more than any other company at "hiding" that information from you. Neither does Apple, neither does Google. So you read the box/advertisement/review and you gloss over the "storage" number to find the "available storage" number and you see if that will meet your needs, and if not you go to the next higher unit of storage. I totally get that the first time you buy a technology product you might miss that, especially if none of your friends are technology users, but you also probably missed it the first time you bought a car and noted that the mileage values on the window didn't really match up with what you were seeing. Or after you cut the bone out of that 10 lb Ham you bought and only had 6 lbs of Ham left over. It seems like faux outrage to me. Now had Marco gone the other way, public ridicule that it takes 43 freaking Gigabytes to provide a web browser and some apps. Hey I'm all down with that. I mean seriously, I have a multi-user time sharing system for the PDP-8 that runs in 43K words, basically one millionth the space and it includes a FORTRAN compiler. But that the box says one thing and the actual value to the customer is less than that? Not exactly shocking. YMMV :-)

onli 14y ago
>My point is that everyone who has bought something with storage has experienced the "comes with X amount of storage (note Y is available for users)" verbiage. There has never been a system I know of which has advertised to have that much space and had so little available, not even relatively. The used space was always almost irrelevant low (be it Windows XP with the hdd available at that time, be it Win 95, heck, even Vista used less - and Android of course, also webOS, behaved better, when going into the mobile space). So - at least if i am not completely mistaken: how should anyone have ever experienced that scam?
Zirro 14y ago
"So how many phones, computers, ipods, laptops, etc have you bought?" I have bought plenty of devices and never have I had any of them present me with only 36% of the advertised storage space.

rglullis 14y ago

Except when Apple decides that there is no need to have a SD slot, and thou shall use iTunes and iCloud to cover all of your needs. If Microsoft decided to give a 32GB SD card as a "system rescue solution" to the Surface in order to save disk space, Marco would write another rant about how MS does not understand the mobile market, and no one wants to think about storage specs and oh my iPad is sooo pretty and it just works.

nextparadigms 14y ago
If the OS takes up 50 GB, 100 GB or 500 GB, that's Microsoft's problem. They shouldn't pass it on to the consumer, and they shouldn't advertise a device as a 100 GB device, if only 50 GB is available to the user. If the OS does take up 50 GB, then just use a separate, hidden to the user disk, and then add the 100 GB disk or whatever you're advertising. And don't make the user pay for that extra 50 GB you're using for the OS. He's already paying for the Windows license being included in the price.
- rglullis 14y ago
  This is absolutely not practical, for reasons that you probably know. And the "already paying for the software, so they shouldn't pay for the hardware" bit makes no sense. Bottom line is: MS is juggling a bunch of different plates with Windows 8 which Apple/Google eliminated by design. For this reason, any technical comparison is worthless. The Surface Pro is intended to run everything that runs on any previous versions of Windows, run fast, be light, provide both a keyboard and a touch-friendly interface, be enterprise-ready, and people are complaining about the amount of storage available after the install? On the cheapest version? Some people will always find an excuse to dismiss any and everything that comes out of Redmond. It's unreasonable.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
darkarmani 14y ago
> Marco would write another rant about how MS does not understand the mobile market That's not really relevant to the legitimacy of the current argument.