No computer ever advertises free space, just total space. This lawsuit is going nowhere.
Hard drive makers got sued. They ended up settling, and paying.
That's different. When you buy a computer that has 250gb, you don't expect 250gb free, maybe 220gb because stuff is pre-installed, which is why the lawsuit won't go anywhere.
When you buy a computer with a 250GB drive, do you expect to only see 125GB of it when you first turn it on? For the majority of users, those 16GB are gone, they have no reasonable hope of getting the remaining space back. If Microsoft advertises it as a 32GB device, I have an expectation that I can copy over say... 24GB of data (accounting for GB v GiB, OS and preinstalled apps), and I don't think that is an unreasonable expectation, I couldn't do that on the Surface. They should have sold it as the capacity that it has, 16GB.
I agree that only having 16GB free of an advertised 32GB is a bit much, but not worthy of a lawsuit. The question is, where exactly do you draw the line? How much free space is OK and how much isn't?
I agree that only having 16GB free of an advertised 32GB is a bit much, but not worthy of a lawsuit. The question is, where exactly do you draw the line? How much free space is OK and how much isn't?
I don't think anyone is going to be prepared to objectively answer that question.
Probably be better if they advertised available space rather than total space.
Marketing will always use whatever numbers make them sound the best unless forced to do otherwise by an outside force.
...The drawback of course is that then they couldn't do things like say 'The Surface is $499 and it's 32GB, the iPad is $499 and it's 16GB! Ha, take that!'. Although at this point, the 16GB iPad and the 32GB Surface have roughly the same usable space...
Gotta laugh about the storage lawsuit. MS throws in a free copy of Office which probably takes up a few gigs and people get pissed because it takes up a few gigs. Uninstall stuff if you want more space. Win8RT only takes up around 7GB, so its not like the OS is taking up all that space.
All MS has to say is the internal memory chip is a standard 32GB and the lawsuit is over. They even have an external SD card option, which is increasingly rare these days.
Thing is there's more than just "a few gigs" between 7 and 16.
I think Android and iOS tablets and phones should have to do the same as well.
And office isn't the only thing that comes preinstalled. My point still stands. All MS has to do is show the chip is a standard 32GB module and that's that.
On the one hand... having half the advertised space is ridiculous.
On the other hand... SD slot, so who cares?
Why exactly would saying 'The internal storage is 32GB' make any difference? When was the last time you bought an any capacity anything, only gotten half the space, and then were ok with that?
What is the definition of capacity? It is how much data a device can store. MS states it has a 32GB capacity, but much of that is used with preinstalled software and the OS. There was no claim made to 32GB of free space upon first boot (MS does give free space numbers, see below), so I don't see the issue here.
Uninstall the free, pack-in programs if you don't want them.
Break it down:
32GB in decimal, only 29GB in binary (for any device), so 29GB actual
5GB for backup/recovery
8GB for OS + Apps + Office
Then if you check MS's Surface FAQ on their website, they clearly advertise the free space:
http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en...ers-and-online-storage/surface-disk-space-FAQ
More space can be freed by uninstalling Office and other apps.
I think it is reasonable to expect that when you open a new device, you will have more than 50% of the advertised space available to you. And I think that it is UNreasonable to expect that the user needs to uninstall tons of stuff on first boot, not because it was a value-add tack-on from the OEM, but because it is taking up an absurd amount of the existing limited space.
When was the last time you bought an any capacity anything, only gotten half the space, and then were ok with that?
When was the last time you bought any computing device (not just a component part) that had the full advertised capacity free? Manufacturers have been preloading things since the first PC's.
Its like buying a car and complaining that the gas tank is half full so that you weren't able to fill it with the full advertised tank capacity. Well duh... of course you can't or the car wouldn't have started.