Tom Warren, The Verge:
A company spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that the 64GB edition of Surface Pro will have 23GB of free storage out of the box. The 128GB model will have 83GB of free storage. It appears that the Windows 8 install, built-in apps, and a recovery partition will make up the 41GB total on the base Surface Pro model.
Holy shit! Microsoft is advertising a “Pro” device as having 64GB of storage. In truth, it ships with a mere 36% of the listed capacity. That’s bonkers.
Before you lecture me about hard drives always shipping with less space than advertised, let’s put it in perspective. Most of the discrepancies originate from advertising space in gigabytes when the OS uses gibibytes.1 There is also the footprint of the operating system. Consider a 64GB iPad. Converting from gigabytes to gibibytes yields a space of around 59.6GB - and subtracting 1GB or so for iOS gives around 58.6GB. That’s roughly 92% of the advertised capacity.
Again, Microsoft is shipping with 36% of the advertised space!
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A gigabyte = 10003 bytes, while a gibibyte is 10243 bytes. For the sake of clarity, I’ll use GB to refer to a device’s space, regardless of units. ↩︎