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Half gone
by 3rdalbum on Sat 17th Nov 2012 06:20 UTC
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We're all computer-literate people who know that an operating system takes up space, and that 32 gigabytes is the maximum capacity of the drive completely empty. (gigabytes, not gibibytes). Once you put a filesystem on it, you've lost some space. Put an operating system on it and you've lost more space.

People who are not as computer-literate as us will not know. They usually don't notice because the amount of space lost is so low when expressed as a percentage of the total capacity.

In other words, who notices 16 gigabytes lost on a 1TB hard disk?

Microsoft has released a tablet with an advertised "32 gigabyte" disk/SSD. It would be reasonable to expect maybe 25 gigabytes of usable space after the OS has been installed. However, there's only 16 gigabytes left after the OS - that's literally 50% of the advertised capacity lost!

Now, if you bought a computer with a 1TB hard disk, and found Windows taking up 500 gigs of that, you'd be pretty pissed too! You've lost half your storage space!

So no, it's not just Microsoft-hate; advertising twice as much storage space as what is actually usable is drastic misadvertising.

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