Microsoft promises more, gives less: 64GB Surface will only have 23GB storage

The new 64GB Microsoft Surface Pro will have only 23GB of free storage. Yes that is confusing, but it’s true. According to The Verge, a company spokesman has confirmed that more than half of the Surface Pro’s storage is taken up by the Windows 8 install program, built-in apps, and a recovery partition.

The time of exponential gigabyte capacity in hard-drives has been dying. No more do we see 500GB+ HDDs in devices (apart from external HDDs and gaming PCs), as the new wave of computing lets you get away with less internal storage. For the most part, anything between 32 and 64GB is considered sufficient. Yet a user would still like to have all or most of those gigs to his disposal. This is something we have seen to a small degree in other storage devices as well, with a certain amount of capacity taken over by info and parameters and what-not, but more than half?

This means that about 64% of the 64GB promised will be useless to a user. Why is it then advertised as a 64GB model? Why not just a 23GB? Similarly, the 128GB model will only have 83GB of storage available at purchase. Microsoft counteracts this by saying that users will be able to free up space by “creating a backup bootable USB and deleting the recovery partition”, but his will still not free up 64 or 128GB. The Surface RT is in a similar you-wont-get-what-was-advertised situation, with half of the 32GB available at purchase.

Then again this is something we see all over with devices, and depending on the country, a user could see his 16GB iPhone only have 12GB available at purchase.