This is frustrating. The Surface Pro has a 128 GB option and goes down from there to 64 GB. The Macbook Air has a 128 GB option and goes up from there to 512 GB.
Edit: this is factually incorrect. There is also a 64 GB MacBook Air model on offer; I forgot about it. I apologize.
~90 GB of free space on both 128 GB models seems reasonable. Stepping down to just ~26 GB free on the 64 GB model seems unreasonable: the usable capacity is less than half of the advertised capacity.
I feel similarly about the recovery partition discussion. If you remove the recovery image, I presume you will not be able to recover the Surface Pro without additional media. The Macbook Air, on the other hand, will allow you to do a fresh re-installation of OS X over the Internet with a completely blank disk: it's baked into the firmware. Therefore, removing the recovery image results in a feature disparity between the systems. Grumble.
Just picked up a micro SD adapter that sits flush in the MBA; allowing me to add another 64GB for about $55 ($40 card, $15 adapter). Not as fast as the internal storage, but perfectly fine for a music library or photos.
No, the 13" Air has an SD card reader, one which leaves part of the card sticking out and requires a special microSD adapter to sit flush, like the one already linked on this thread: http://theniftyminidrive.com
Lots of people with 13" Airs don't realise the 11" lacks the SD card reader, so it's a common mistake to make. (It's also a pity the 11" doesn't have it - I've missed the SD card reader a lot more than the ethernet port.)
Woe to those of us who are fans of the iMac for home usage. We have ONE SSD option in the new iMac, a whopping 1300 dollar upgrade to a 768g SSD. The previous system offered a 256g option which for many was sufficient.
How it benefits Apple to offer only a 768 (and why that number) I will never know. I can only imagine the sales they lose for not having the 256 or 512 options in the iMac. Its not like they don't have the parts
Metadata overhead is proportional to the size of the disk, as is flash reserve space. Also, Apple might have sensibly left some stuff out of the 64GB image.
It's terrible whatever it is. And it hates network drives. And iPhoto and iTunes hate remote libraries. And then they create local ones without asking and mess everything up. And if 2 computers share the library terrible things happen to the library and it gets corrupted (presumably the library stops matching the locally held file and its very easy to accident use the wrong remote library as after a disconnection a pop up asks which library you want to use. Pay careful attention at this point as a database rebuilt is the minimum pain one will experience with a miss click.). And the OS hates telling you what is taking up space so good luck freeing it up. Never again - although the 64 was accidentally ordered rather than the 128 and I assumed everything would be ok. It wasn't.
Microsoft tries to address that issue by including an SD card slot for expanded storage. However, the +$300 that you have to pay to Apple to upgrade from 128GB to 256GB is also completely absurd.
I would like to see someone kill an SD card in "minutes." My camera shoots HD video at some stupidly high bit rate and stores it onto my SD card at damn near as fast as the card will take it, and I do this a lot. There are thousands of people who do it even more than I do, and it can take months or years to go through a card.
> (April 17th) We are currently testing a sample of 40 4GB microSD cards from Sandisk to failure
> Its May now and still no cards have failed.
> we were testing a card from a customer yesterday on a TS-7553 and it failed the DoubleStore stress tests within the day. [...] The test failed at approximately 13 GB of raw data written
> The ATP card failed a 3rd time after 65GB of data written.
> Another, separate ATP card failed after 877 GB of write activity
If the card is MLC and there's no or limited wear leveling, repeated local writes will shut the card dead quickly ("limited" as in wear leveling being applied only among e.g a 4MB group of cells, Sandisk happens to do that). I've also heard of some controllers implementing wear leveling, muddling the test results.
Some cards are truly reliable, others are craptastic, and everything in between is possible. The problem is you can't trust a brand and go for it, and getting the technical details, if at all possible, involves digging into cryptic and hard to find documentations.
I can't find the link again to a test of someone who tested various card brands and had them die semi-reliably within 15 minutes.
I'm sure longevity is good for taking photos. I bet it wouldn't be so great for compiles on a dev box. Of course, no one would ever do that. It would be just too slow.
The numbers I'm familiar with were under a dollar for Flash that you'd want to have in a computer, with decent bandwidth. Not garbage flash drives made from a chip fab's borderline rejects.
Apple is making at least 50% margins on this, probably /much much/ more.
An SD storage slot is not equivalent to having more space on the internal disk drive. It might be fine for storing a large music library or something like that, but for applications where disk latency or bandwidth really matter, there's just no comparison.
Agreed, it's a bit of a straw man. It's certainly an issue that hard drive capacity is advertised as being higher than it actually is (and that BS apple is pulling is inexcusable), but the actual issue people were taking with the Surface is the fact that when you buy it it's packed so full of bloat and crapware that half the useable disk space is already depleted on a 64gb model.
You shouldn't have to tweak a consumer device fresh out of the box. Heck, I program on my MBA and literally the only thing I've done is let it run Software Update when it asks me, change the wallpaper, and dial up the trackpad speed.
When people buy a laptop they expect the OS will take up a good chunk of the storage space. When people buy a tablet they don't have that expectation.
More importantly, when the free space is significantly less than half the advertized storage and there is no warning that's the case people are going to be surprized and upset, and rightfully so.
In a Macbook Air the worst you get is a reduction to about 70-75% of the listed storage capacity (in the 128 or 64 gb models), which is annoying but not crazy. In the Surface Pro 64 model you are reduced to about 1/3 of the initial capacity, which is ridiculous and definitely deserves some sort of warning on the packaging, I would think. Expecting a reduction by 1/4 is reasonable common sense, experiencing a reduction by 2/3 is surprising.
I disagree, desktops and tablets should advertise their usable space. The true drive space should still be available on the spec sheet, but usable space should be the main highlight.
Disk space has a history of misleading sizing, with 1 "MB" often meaning 1000 KiB, and 1 "GB" seeming to mean any combination of decimal and binary multipliers between 1GB and 1GiB (Including 1000 "MB", which might itself be something between 1 MB and 1 MiB).
Given that mess, I can't see the marketeers taking the trouble to distinguish between total and free space. The first company to honestly advertise the space on their device in the manner you describe will miss out on sales due to poorly written (or poorly understood) comparison tables.
And home broadband providers should advertise their contention rates. And, if that starter is free with the main course, I'll just have the starter free on its own please.
Can I add to that and say that the device should also carry a price tag that reflects what will come out my pocket. That happens where I live, but I went to San Francisco recently and when buying found that the price tag excludes tax. What? What's the price tag for then? Make the writing on the label reflect what I give and what I get.
Unfortunately, not displaying the customer's actual cost until the point of purchase is an annoying Americanism that applies to almost every financial transaction.
As an American consumer, I don't find this confusing; taxes change even among individual small cities, and they can change multiple times per year. The taxes really have nothing to do with my actual purchase: it feels more like a payment processing fee, a "cost of living". Yes: I realize that as a non-American consumer this sounds insane. People have different expectations and subtle details can change opinions; I pretty much never hear an American complaining, however, that they didn't realize there was a tax on something.
Surely there is an advantage in being the company that says $100. No additional taxes, no add ons, no surprises. Plenty of companies here and in other countries keep retail costs flat across a market despite the cost of a sale fluctuating. Maybe I ask too much.
Sure, but with USB 3.0 getting similar speeds to the internal SSD (according to Anandtech) I can add another 64gb to my surface pro for 30 bucks! Try doing that on an iPad.
Well sure, except 1) I don't need to because iOS doesn't waste as much space; and 2) That's a whole separate partition with a separate set of data to manage/lose, and a new USB drive to have sticking out of your Surface all the time, unplugging and putting away when you pack it up and pulling it out and plugging it in when you're looking to do work.
Personally, I wouldn't want a 'tablet' with a USB drive sticking out two inches all the time.
There are plenty of reasons, but the question is whether or not they are good reasons.
A Windows install, for example, will have lots of pre-cached drivers, a crap-ton of little utility programs, several pre-installed libraries and frameworks (.net, vb6, etc.), and a VM for running 32-bit apps. All of these things provide valuable features for the OS.
Now, on top of that there is certainly plenty of bloat, and in many instances linux has simply approached these same problems differently. For example by installing shared libraries on demand via the internet through a package management system, or by simply having poorer hardware and cross-architecture support (zing!), or by having a vast ecosystem of open source tools available so that it's always possible to install something via a native compilation. Those are good choices for the linux way of doing things but they certainly come with tradeoffs.
P.S. Linux should be installable on the Surface Pro, so if the hardware intrigues anyone it might be worthwhile to see how it fares with a different OS.
Ever tried getting word docs into Indesign without converting to RTF as an interim step? This may not be a MS problem and may be Adobes fault, but whenever I get a .doc, importing into indesign directly makes my life miserable for too often. Even if it doesn't crash Indesign, it often causes strange behaviour and bizarre formatting issues.
Between that and the damn paper clip wizard man of old, my Office suite tolerance is about zero.
But LibreOffice, ouch. After this last week, one more 'java update required' popup and I might start crying. I DID IT 1 MINUTE AGO.
I've no skin in this. To be honest its an article by someone that has a track record for being economic with facts and it's on ZDnet, which is good enough reason to ignore it. However I don't see so much "fanboys" (please don't, it's childish), as people desperately trying to prove the authors point. I'd suggest at this stage and as a neutral the exact opposite is the case.
You're wrong. Ed Bott has a track record of being very accurate with the facts.
You are, of course, welcome to produce some bulletproof factual examples (since you have just shown your opinions are not worth anything) to prove otherwise.
Calm down. He has been paid by Microsoft in the past so his opinions are hardly partisan and being economic with facts means that he often tells half a story, generally Microsofts. Like I said, I don't care either way, what I do care about is needless name calling and veiled ad hominems.
You mean, I should stand idly by while you casually malign the integrity of a good journalist? Sorry, I'm calling you out for bullshit. So far you score highly for innuendo and zero for producing any substantial facts or other concrete evidence.
Nice page, but I don't think _Simon realises he made an ad hominem attack on Ed Bott and ZDNet. _Simon's language is rather vague ("needless name calling" -- where exactly?) and sloppy (its where he means it's; "hardly partisan" - what does he think he means?), so his command of English may be part of his problem.
Either way, based on long experience, I always suspect that anyone who says "To be honest" really means "I am just about to lie".
Wow. Arrogant much? The truth is that you are not really interested in actually discussing the facts. Ed Bott was paid by Microsoft to promote Windows 7 in his blog back in 2008. His views are not partisan and his articles as a result are meritless. He, in simple words just for you, is biased in favor of Microsoft. ZDNet, much like other online IT tabloids like The Register, habitually publish nothing but trash that is designed for the sole purpose of advertising views. That this and other similar stories have recently featured so prominently has set alarm bells ringing.
To be honest, I really don't care what you think because so far you've done nothing but troll me. Using "sloppy" spelling as a reason to discredit what I said as well as calling me a liar? Come on, you surely can do better than that!
The truth is that you have yet to provide any facts to back up your smearing of Ed Bott and ZDNet.
> "His views are not partisan"
As I pointed out before, you have problems understanding and/or using the English language. Partisan means "an adherent or supporter of a person, group, party, or cause, especially a person who shows a biased, emotional allegiance."
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/partisan
Now, the gist of your unsupported attack on Bott is that he is partisan, but you keep saying he is "not partisan".
See what I did there? I pointed out your mistake, and I supported it with independent factual evidence. If you want to take part in a grown up conversation, you should learn to do the same.
> "I really don't care what you think because so far you've done nothing but troll me."
Again, you obviously don't have a clue what trolling is. However, I reckon you can probably use Google to figure it out. Calling you out for bullshit is not trolling.
I have previously pointed out that you are attacking someone without producing any evidence, but you continually resort to ad hominem attacks (calling me a troll is another ad hominem attack, following your ad hominem attack on Bott).
You claim to be against ad hominem attacks and name calling (see above) but this is exactly what you are doing! This fits perfectly with the strategy of using the word "honest" when you are being dishonest.
Still, you can prove you are honest pretty easily, as follows....
Show us some evidence that you have a clue what you are talking about. Bott posts evidence of his expertise and (very high) professional standing, and I linked to that above. Where is yours?
Next, produce the evidence that Bott was "paid by Microsoft", and under what circumstances.
If you can't support your claim with evidence then, sadly, nobody has any alternative but to decide that you are a liar. It's not just me. Rational people want to hear rational arguments based on checkable facts. That's not too much to ask of you, is it?
> "The truth is that you are not really interested in actually discussing the facts."
Another ad hominem attack on me that attempts to divert the discussion away from the point. The truth is that I keep asking you for facts and you have not provided any. None.
So, are you going to keep posting bullshit replies? It might not be a wisest approach. As it is (and this is a factual observation) you're just making yourself look stupid.
Possibly, but that claim is false. On the 64GB Surface Pro, the fraction should be 1/2, if the calculation is done in decimal (billions of) bytes.
As with the MacBook Air and other systems, the 64GB or 128GB (decimal) that is advertised only comes to 59GB or 119GB of real (binary) space.
If you are still naive enough to think that buying a 128GB PC or drive gets you 128GB of usable binary file space then your calculation cannot possibly be correct.
Note, I'm not saying that 1/2 is good, merely that 1/3 is wrong.
This is for people who want tablet + laptop but dont want carry+charge+pay for 2 devices. It's really not that difficult to understand, I dont know why HN has such a hard time understanding this.
"But the iPad is a better tablet!!!", yeh but the surface is a full system.
"But the air is better laptop!!" yeh but the surface has tablet capabilities.
"Buy an Air + iPad!!" I dont want to pay extra plus its a hassle to carry + manage 2 devices
I don't think HN has a hard time understanding it, they just think it's not going to be a successful product. Device consolidation is always tricky, but for it to be really successful the integrated device has to be "good enough" in both areas. E.g. people don't buy consumer digital cameras anymore because cell phone cameras are perfectly serviceable.
Is the Surface Pro a "good enough" laptop? I'd argue no, not with the keyboard/trackpad situation and lack of a rigid connecting hinge. Ars's review noted as much. As it a "good enough" tablet? I'd argue no, not with the weight, heat, and short battery life.
Now, obviously "good enough" is in the eye of the beholder. When people rag on Surface Pro, the thinking is that it's not going to be "good enough" in both roles for the majority of customers, and as such isn't going to sell.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the unit is priced at more serious users, those who can't get away with an iPad + keyboard attachment by itself. Those users are more likely to see the keyboard/trackpad issue as a deal breaker for serious work. Less serious users, who don't need the extra capability, have no reason to look at it over an iPad.
Also, don't forget about how 7" tablets factor into the equation, because they make it more practical to carry a laptop + tablet. An 11.6" MBA + iPad Mini 16GB will run you $1330 versus about $1030 for 64GB for the Surface, and weigh in at around a pound heavier. But, in return you get more combined screen real estate, more combined storage, and triple the combined battery life.
I've only played around with the surface in the stores.
To me this is the first iteration of a brand new form factor. Of course it has problems. But the great thing is that the other companies like Lenovo, ASUS,HP..ect will look at this and hopefully see its problems and iterate on it.
Also the new intel CPU is aimed at this form factor, which is suppose to cut heat and battery use to "near" ARM levels.
For me it will be amazing to have 1 product for everything. Ubuntu on my tablet? sure! hook up to external monitor, write on it, type on the screen, type on the mini keyboard, type on a full keyboard? all possible.
So you don't think the Asus Transformer represented any sort of hardware innovation? The Asus Padphone? The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon? The TouchSmart 9300 Elite? Really?
You need to do more product research. What's the point of claiming a "lack of innovation" if you don't actually have a clue what innovations these products offer?
>To me this is the first iteration of a brand new form factor.
Yes! It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
The first Macbook Air significantly compromised to achieve its form factor, and now the Surface is doing the same. If Microsoft can fix the compromises in two years like Apple did with the MBA, they could have a real winner.
Also, there is choice. There is the Asus Transformer Book coming out, which is perhaps even more powerful (i7) and has a dockable keyboard with extra battery. Or if you want something not as powerful but lighter weight, without a noisy fan, and much better battery life, there is the Asus Vivotab TF810C out now, or the Samsung ATIV Smart PC, although they have the clovertrail atom processor which looks like may not allow installing Linux.
> although they have the clovertrail atom processor which looks like may not allow installing Linux.
That's probably going to be solved soon. The incentive to build X86 android tablets is high and, by judging the battery life of the Atom powered Motorola phone, it'll be a very attractive option.
It is about execution. Then it is the difference between:
*) I got an awesome tablet + laptop [best case]
*) Ok laptop but crappy as a tablet (heavy, slow...) [meh]
*) Ok tablet but crappy laptop (don't have access to all the tools, too restrictive, bad keyboard...) [meh]
*) Crappy tablet and crappy laptop. [complete disappointment]
Agreed. I never said that the Surface is a perfect device, it has its problems but its a step in the right direction. For me at least.
I want to see the consolidation of tablets and laptops. I dont care who does it. If iOS and Android become good enough for me to replace my laptop then great!
The question is: how important is consolidation as a feature? Surface Pro doesn't let you do anything that you couldn't already do with your laptop + tablet. That's a crucial point in comparison to the iPad, because iPad was better for on-the-go media consumption (or on-the-couch media consumption) than either a smart phone or a laptop. The value-add in the Surface Pro, then, is just consolidation.
With existing technology, that consolidation involves a lot of compromises. My MBA + my iPad Mini may be heavier than a Surface Pro, but combined get 14-15 hours of battery life, which means I can pretty easily leave the charger at home. Can you leave the Surface Pro charger at home? With only 3-5 hours, no you can't. The combo gives me a choice of two screen sizes (13" and 8") as well as the ability to use both screens at once (say looking up documentation on the Mini while coding on the MBA). And the MBA has a far superior keyboard and trackpad.
Does consolidation outweigh those other advantages? I don't think it will except for a narrow class of people. Surface Pro is really threading the needle--targeting users who need more than just a tablet by itself (which most people don't), but also don't need a portable screen bigger than 10" or a good keyboard.
It's much simpler and more convenient to use one device than two, which is why people no longer use Palm PDAs. This doesn't mean Surface Pro is the best form factor for everyone. Surface Pro has about the same battery life as a MacBook Air, but it could be much longer if the keyboard had a second battery.
That was the idea behind the Asus Transformer, and in hardware terms, it works very well. (The software is another story.)
Of course, the resulting weight would be more like carrying both an MBA and an iPad as well, but at least you wouldn't have to pay for two motherboards, two screens, two keyboards, two sets of RAM etc.
In passing, you don't get longer battery life if you use two devices at the same time, as in your example. And if you search on one screen while coding on the other, the Surface Pro is dramatically better. You get real multi-tasking and two apps side by side on the tablet screen, and you can copy and paste between the tablet and the desktop, or use a Share charm to send stuff from one app to another. Basically, you're using the iPad mini like a book, aren't you?
The fact that I can hold it like a book/piece of paper/clipboard means I can shift my position whilst using it - whether that is leaning back in my seat, or walking around the house/office - in a way that's just not practical with a laptop.
A ton of the new Windows 8 Laptops have touchscreen capabilities now. So... not really.
In fact, Asus Windows 8 Laptops will soon have Leap Motion, which is a far far superior option to touch screen. Hopefully Apple follows suit with their Macbook Pros.
To be fair, I'm not as excited about Surface anymore, as I am more excited about everyone else actually. XPS 12 duo seems to be the superior convertible, and the soon to be Lenovo Helix is the best executed detachable that I've seen so far. XPS Duo 12, Helix, and Surface all offer 1080p. Surface's major differentiator is actually the pressure sensitive pen that comes bundled with the device. I'd expect the Surface to be the best artist tool of the tablet / laptops out so far. Asus differentiating themselves with the Leap Motion puts them on my radar though.
But really, it goes to show that with Windows 8, you have a ton of good choices coming up. Whats most important? Solid Keyboard / Nub / Touchpad ? Get the Lenovo Helix.
Wanna experiment with futuristic controls? Get a Asus Leap-based Windows 8 convertible when they come out.
> In fact, Asus Windows 8 Laptops will soon have Leap Motion, which is a far far superior option to touch screen
How do you know? Have you tried it yourself? Have you tried it outside a demo context? Have you played an extended gaming session? Done actual context creation? You'd have to have done all that before you know it's not, "Hello 1989 called. Wants its Powerglove back."
tl;dr: On the 128GB models (Surface Pro vs. Macbook Air), they both leave ~90GB free space.
The problem for Microsoft is that they are competing at the same time against laptops and tablets. For someone who's looking for a tablet, it loses badly to an iPad (the free space sticks out, but it is by now means the only place an iPad wins). For someone who's looking for a laptop, it loses to many laptops (in price, performance, ergonomics - whatever it is you care about, there's something that handily beats the Surface Pro).
Are there any people who are looking for something that's sort-of-a-tablet and sort-of-a-laptop, and are willing to get a device that is not competitive as either? We'll soon find out.
My own experience leads me to believe that until you have perfected a niche (neither laptops or tablets are there yet), extreme specialization always wins against generalization.
A tablet is nothing like as portable as a smartphone (which also has 3G), and nothing like as fast, as powerful or as capable as a laptop (which also has a keyboard).
Are there any people who are looking for something that's sort-of-a-smartphone and sort-of-a-laptop, and are willing to get a device that is not competitive as either?
Especially as they already own both a laptop and a phone ;-)
> A tablet is nothing like as portable as a smartphone
A lot of people would disagree with you, perhaps most people. A tablet actually is VERY similar to a large portable smartphone - it doesn't fit in your pants pocket, but it does fit in almost any other purse.
In fact, Samsung makes an extremely popular device - the Samsung Note, which is halfway between a phone and a tablet. Do play with one. "nothing like" is a strong statement that I believe has no support in reality.
> So obviously nobody will ever buy a tablet. QED.
The logic that leads to that is flawed, even if one does accept the (wrong, IMHO) premise that a tablet is nothing like as portable as a smartphone.
And my answer to "are there any people ..." is simply "we'll soon see". I don't claim to know a definite answer -- unlike, e.g. Ballmer in response to the iPhone and iPad.
I was parodying your argument to make it look ridiculous, which it was, and I apologise if you missed the point. However, I agree that neither of us knows a definite answer ;-)
I'm not particularly optimistic about Surface sales myself, but it's an extremely interesting approach. I can certainly imagine that version 3 will be a killer product, and I hope it is, but I'm not putting any money on it.
Well there is me. I wanted a dev machine that I could use as a desktop, laptop or occasional tablet. I ended up with a Sony Vaio Duo which is pretty good at what I want.
Or there is my (leaving) boss who has a laptop, desktop and iPad but is now going to a W8 tablet, probably a Surface Pro or Helix.
Or there is my (incoming) boss who has a desktop and an android tablet but would prefer a single device.
When I show my Duo off to people, no-one has said "what a bad idea". What they have said is "how much" and "can I have it".
While the surface pro itself may not be the right device, there are a lot of people who would like a good convertible device.
>For someone who's looking for a laptop, it loses to many laptops (in price, performance, ergonomics - whatever it is you care about, there's something that handily beats the Surface Pro
Is there an ultrabook laptop with a 1080p touchscreen, an active digitizer with a stylus, atleast Core i5 for $1000 to $1100 ? I am not being facetious here, I am looking to buy something to replace my 6 year old laptop so looking for real suggestions here.
If you want to use a pen workflow, Surface Pro is hands down the best choice.
The problem for Microsoft isn't that Surface Pro isn't a good pen tablet. It's that 98% of people don't want, or don't know they want, a pen tablet. Now, before the iPad, 98% of people didn't know they wanted a tablet. That's a fair point. But in the last decade, Microsoft has demonstrated zero market making ability of that kind.
On top of that, Surface Pro is probably not the ideal pen tablet for current technology. I think a cheaper, lighter, thinner device with a Clovertrail processor, digitizer, and 8+ hours of battery life would have hit the sweet spot if Microsoft wanted to make a serious go at making pen computing happen. My guess is that the battery life is going to lose them a lot more customers than the extra oomph of the Ivy Bridge is going to gain them.
You may well be correct. However, since this is Windows, there is some chance that Lenovo, Acer, Asus, MSI, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, HP, Dell or one of several hundred other companies will hit your sweet spot. It's not like you were limited to a single manufacturer.
In fact, if you think your sweet spot PC would be attractive to a lot of people, you could set up a company and market it yourself. There are hundreds of factories in the Pearl River Delta capable of producing that sort of thing at a reasonable price. Kickstarter here you come?
Most of those manufacturers sell crappy products with bizarre bits of brain damage in otherwise good machines. E.g. awesome Sony laptop that's got 2 hours of battery life, or great Samsung device that's a fax-aluminum plastic piece of shit. I wouldn't even touch a PC laptop from someone other than Lenovo, and judging by everyone else's sales figures, I'm apparently not alone.
That's the real hope of Surface--to free us from OEM's and their OEM crapware and OEM brain damage. Microsoft has a lot of money, but even it can't buy the Chinese/Taiwanese OEM's taste.
There is just a powerful marketing pitch in being able to sell a product "this is the one true way Windows 8 was meant to be experienced." There is a reason everyone raves about the Nexus 4/7/10. Surface is the only Windows 8 tablet on the market that can go toe to toe with Apple in terms of industrial design and vertical integration. The success of Windows 8 tablets lives and dies with Surface.
I'm not sure that overstating your case is a sensible approach to argument. Lenovo is not the only company with good PCs, and a handful of PC companies sell more units than Apple, so clearly people do buy them. More than 300m a year of them, as a matter of fact.
However, your point on crapware is well made. Unfortunately, Microsoft can't do anything about it (because the DoJ sued it into the ground and specifically prevented it). Also, crapware brings in money and this is significant in a market that buys on price. I don't see it changing in the near future.
I loved the X201 tablet (apart from heating issues), but the crap resolution and 16:9 on that line makes it not worth having.
I have a feeling that this year, we're going to see a lot of decent small-sized, full res devices, thanks to Apple's Retina push. Haswell is supposed to be out mid-year so that might also help create some better devices.
Samsung Smart PC Pro (include ATIV in the name for North America I think). Ticks all the spec boxes you mention, but is a bit above the price range.
I like it because it can be a full laptop, with real hinge (unlike the Surface Pro), but can still detatch to be a real tablet. Coupled with the official 360° handstrap case, I don't find its heft to be an issue in tablet mode either.
I was unsure about whether I'd have use for the stylus when I bought it, but it has exceeded expectations. It is great for inputting short text here and there (e.g. searching the web). It is also great for having finer grained input for those occasions when I want to drop into the Win8's 'desktop mode' without switching the hardware back into 'notebook mode' (i.e. avoiding the need for the mouse pad for casual usage).
3rd gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor available
Windows 8 64-bit
11.6" Full HD IPS touch display (1920 x 1080)
Converts from tablet to laptop
Digitizer stylus
Do you really need a digitizer? Quite a few artistic people I know are fine with a "capacitively detectable stylus". It doesn't have 1024 pressure levels (or however much the wacom or whatever on the surface does). The accuracy of some touch screens (most notably the ipad) seems to be sufficient unless you require a real pressure sensitive surface.
Ok, poll: how many of you really want a digitizer (and have ever used one for more than a few minutes)?
Yes, there's an Asus Zenbook one, with a larger 11.6" screen. It doesn't have a stylus though, but unless you really care about a stylus, and you just want a laptop, then it shouldn't matter.
Again, the top comment on an HN thread involving Apple is one that supports Apple by digging up some "fact" or the other that makes Apple look OK. This has always been this ridiculous.
At least AAPL investors are pricing in a future loss of earnings as everyone except the hardcore fanboys move to more open platforms that are priced at 75% to 50% of Apple products and allow you to plug in USB and play along well with other manufacturer's hardware by implementing open protocols like DLNA.
Anecdote : I bought an LG TV and discovered without doing any additional setup, my Samsung phone now shows a TV icon on the photos, and when I clicked it, I was surprised to find the photo pop up on the TV. As I swipe my finger on the phone, the photos scroll on the TV. Voila! I honestly don't know whether this is some kind of PnP broadcast, DLNA, WiDi, or what!
Next : my HP laptop has an Intel WiDi app on it and the TV has a "Wifi Screen Share". Hmm, let's see...bang! Laptop screen now wirelessly mirrored on the TV. LG TV, Samsung phone, HP laptop. I bet Apple products would not work with anything other than Apple this way.
I think part of this comes from the abstractions used for tablets vs. "traditional" computers. (With the surface being viewed as a tablet by most consumers, vs. the air being seen as a traditional laptop).
In tablets, the trend seems to be to abstract away/hide the OS as much as possible – it isn't something that runs on the machine, it is the machine – if that makes sense. Compare this to the laptop world where we're all engrained to conceive of the OS as something that is installed on the machine and in most/all cases is able to be swapped out (insert plug for your favorite Linux distro here, etc.)
So, given that, most consumers willingly accept the space the OS takes up as a given on the laptop yet the same people see the listing the tablet storage including the space required for the OS as disingenuous.
When you want to abstract away something, if your abstraction leaks, it usually hampers the user experience or user perception of the offering – as this case illustrates (IMHO).
> And with one minor tweak that doesn’t affect the system’s capabilities in any way
If that were the case, why would that feature even be included? Obviously it does impact the capabilities, when things go wrong.
Also interesting to note they call it a "minor tweak". What percentage of tablet (or laptop) users even know about a recovery image?
I small fraction, I'd wager.
They're referring to the recovery partition. And while most of the time you're never going to need such a thing, when you're dealing with a device like the Surface it's going to come in very handy when you do.
This is just a personal anecdote , but I've had a large number of Dell laptops (100+) which all seem to have recovery partitions rather than install media now days. Whenever something fails, it's been a hard drive hardware failure, In which case the recovery partition is completely useless.
I have never used a recovery partition successfully.
The fact that you have such a large number of laptops in your possession suggests to me that you're probably in a corporate IT setting (apologies if I'm wrong). In such a case, Hardware failures are probably going to be the most prevalent mode of failure for needing a system re-image, since software usage is going to be in-line with corporate policies. People aren't going to venture into warez sites, etc.
But for the average, non-technical user, I think you'd see a much higher incidence of needing a system re-image due to viruses, malware, spyware, etc.
But then the average user is likely to take it to any number of computer repair shops who might try the recovery partition, or they might just reimage from an OEM install disk they have lying around/available.
The people hosing their system like that aren't likely to be able to use a recovery partition. I would guess they'd take the computer to a shop to get it fixed.
The suggestion was that you can retain the recovery partition contents on another drive (eg a USB drive), which is something that supposedly can't be done on the MBA. [e: maybe you can.. although the link does not make it clear that it can be removed from the MBA's disk, and the point was really about the saved space]
I agree few will likely know about it, but that doesn't make it invalid, nor is the space saved irrelevant to those that do.
> Microsoft has been pummeled by critics this week over supposedly inadequate storage space in its new Surface Pro.
It wasn't about the inadequacy of the storage space in and of itself – 25/64GB or 90/128GB is not decidedly inadequate for all users, and is (as the article explains) in the ballpark of usable space for comparable laptops.
There's a separate issue regarding the advertising of storage industry-wide that has merit, but this issue is about the amount of usable storage space in the context of the rest of the tablet market.
Sure, the Surface is comparable on storage space to competing laptops including those offered by Apple, but it's not even in the same ballpark as competing tablets.
Microsoft is pitching the Surface as a competitor to both tablets and laptops, separately and together. It therefore needs to compete against features of both, and it seems it can't when it comes to this specific feature.
When did the redefining of a KB from 1024 bytes to 1000 bytes happen? And has it truly happened? If you get 2GB RAM don't you get 2048 MB, not 2000 MB? I've always thought it was just the harddrive manufacturers being stingy, claiming their drives had more than they actually did.
The switch - although not in my head - came when more people got computers, cameras and iPods, being exposed to storage compared to computers, where they didn't care or know. People care about storage since the store large amounts of mp3 and images.
1000KB = 1GB, 1000GB = 1TB is easier for most people than 1024KiB = 1GiB, 1024Gib = 1TiB.
Manufactures do it because bigger numbers sell better than smaller ones.
Which works fine until people create or download a few files and find they have been conned: they don't have as much usable space as they thought they'd paid for.
The redefining went the other way. Under the conventions of metric prefixes, k has always meant 1000, not 1024. It was only in the computer industry that k was bastardized to mean 1024, and once enough people realized it was wrong, they created the ki prefix to indicate the 10th power of 2.
So having "proven" Windows 8 has no advertising (by somehow claiming the apps with ads weren't really part of Windows 8) Ed Bott turns to proving the 128GB Surface has more storage space than the Macbook Air by deleting tons of stuff from the Surface and nearly freeing up as much space as the latter has by default.
Note that the OS X recovery partition is only 650 MB, since it downloads the actual installation image from the internet on the fly.
Are you sure that the Surface Pro's disk actually offers 127.90 GB of block device? To my inexpert ears, that seems to imply that it's actually larger than 128 GB, which sounds wrong.
Wow, and I thought Disk Utility was only a piece of shit for hiding partitions from me :-)
We've had at least one dispute with a customer who didn't get the "advertised" storage space when buying hosting - it's easy to you say this server has 8 x 500GB drives in a RAID10, but we've had a customer unhappy when 1.9 binary terabytes of data didn't fit onto that after RAID metadata, filesystem overhead etc.
So the new product (bigv.io) expresses storage and RAM in binary gigabytes, and I'm thinking I might convert all the dedicated server storage specifications away from lying drive manufacturer sizes, even if that means advertising a 465GiB disc. (or should we advertise size after ext3 overhead arrrggghh).
I hope you stick with the decimal units, because it means that if I have 8 x 500 GB drives, that's 4 GB. If I have 8 x 500 GiB, then I have 3.90625 TiB, which I need a calculator for. Frustrating and annoying.
The fact this conversation is taking place is very droll. Articles are being written, comments and forums are running hot just because so many people are effectively saying "How dare someone say that my favourite vendor's computer has less disk space than another (obviously inferior) vendor"
Isn't anyone just happy to not have a spinning platter of metal in their laptop? There has always been a difference between unformatted and formatted space on disks. Look at an old box of 1.44MB floppy disks and you'll clearly see that formatted space and unformatted space are reported separately. The same thing goes for hard drives. What file system you put on the HD can make a difference too.
There will always be somewhat less space than the full raw capacity. In this case the problem appears to be shipping large pre-installed software and OS on a smallish SSD. Five years from now when higher capacity is cheaper, no one will even care.
Interesting he mentions removing the Windows recovery partition, but not the ML one which is hardly top secret knowledge.
Apple is no better, but none of the other manufacturers are. Storage space is one of those wonderful facts which turn out not to be as factual they could be.
Apple has at least taken up using the manufacturer advertised figures instead of using the real size. So a 1TB drive in Mac OS X looks like it can store 1 TB of data. If you were to download 1 TiB of data from the internet you'd find that your 1 TB disk is a little small ;-).
The author wrongly dismisses the impact of the SSD's spare area on usable storage:
> "The parts about wear-leveling blacks and bad blocks are just part of how SSDs work. On a new SSD these numbers should be very small."
This is absolutely wrong. Modern SSDs reserve a significant part of their NAND even when new. For example, the Micron C400 used in the Surface Pro has 128GiB of NAND and reserves 6.8% as spare area, and thus presents to the OS as a 119.2GiB block device. An Intel SSD 525 with the same 128GiB of NAND reserves 12.6% spare area, so it presents 111.8GiB to the OS. The author's MacBook Air seems to have about 11.7% spare area. They're still fundamentally the same amount of storage, but drives with smaller spare area will generally perform worse when they are nearly full, and having less spare area can also reduce the longevity of the drive.
That is true, but in my experience third-party SSDs don't include the reserve space in the advertised drive size.
For example, I have several "60GB" drives that actually have 64GB of internal storage but the extra 4GB is reserved. I also have several "128GB" drive that actually do show up as 128GB to the OS, meaning the reserve space is in addition to the 128GB, not part of it.
Another 120GB drive I has reports the exact same binary size (112GiB) as the Macbook Air "128GB". So it appears that Apple is including the reserve space in the advertised drive size while third-party SSDs do not.
All SSDs advertised as either 128GB or 120GB come with exactly 128GiB of total NAND, with 5-15% reserved as spare area. If the spare area is chosen to be 6.87%, then that exactly accounts for the difference between a binary gigabyte (GiB) and decimal gigabyte, so a 128GiB SSD can have exactly 128 decimal GB of usable space.
Solid state storage is always delivered in capacities that correspond to binary gigabytes, because that's how the chips themselves are sized, packaged, and addressed by the SSD controller. The Surface has 128GiB of NAND (not HDD), and the reserved "spare area" that is not visible to the OS makes the usable area 119.2GiB, or 128 decimal GB.
I recently purchased a 4TB external hard drive. It was the first hard drive I have ever come across that had exactly 4tb of free space when I opened it. Usually its a little bit less. I can remember my 80gig hard drive I spent all summer saving up for back around 2000 only have 66gigs and being totally bummed out.
I know with flash memory the units are more exact, but are they getting better with the spinning hd's with the space accuracy?
> are they getting better with the spinning hd's with the space accuracy?
It's not so much a question of accuracy as it is one of units. Storage manufacturers have typically used GB, software has typically used GiB, labeled as "GB."
Which is why your 80,000,000,000 byte HD is 80 GB on the box but 74.5 GiB when plugged in.
OS X 10.6 decided to harmonize the two: it reports size in terms of GB (10^9), abandoning GiB (2^30), meaning what you see on the box finally matches what you see in software. The downside is that your files appear larger than you may be used to, since that "1.00 GB" (GiB) file is now being reported as "1.07 GB."
The difference is in expectations. The Surface Pro may be slightly immune to that, but when someone buys a tablet, they are buying a media consumption device, so that they can download and read/watch/listen to files at their leisure. There is little file system access, and it is largely abstracted away.
A PC is a general purpose device with full access to the file system and the ability to do much more than a traditional tablet. If the surface is a touchscreen laptop it should be marketed as such. I cant believe that we are all having the discussion around what a megabyte or multiple thereof is. PCs smartphones and electronics have always been so specific as to their tech specs I dont understand who decided it would be a good idea to have a conversion factor between megabyte and a "million" bytes. At the end of the day, however, its just tech press and people with too much time on their hands complaining about a small aspect of a device. Articles like this make me grumpy...
This thread seems to be full of good advice about laptops, so maybe I can get help on something slightly unrelated: Anyone have recommendation for a tablet (or laptop that converts to tablet) that has outdoor readable screen? Not direct sun, but sitting-in-the-car-on-a-sunny-day readable.
So far, HP EliteBook with its "outdoor readable screen" option (extra $100 and 2 week wait) is the best I've found, and it's not very good. Lenovo's outdoor readable screen comes close, but is not as good.
I'm sure this is a solved problem - but I can't find a decent solution. Help, anyone? Some special ipad case/screen sticker? Some screen technology I'm unaware of?
LCD's are still very reflective in sunlight. Only E-ink or PixelQi displays are really good in sunlight, but you lose colors. There was the Notion Ink Adam tablet. Not sure if they are still making new ones.
Matte LCDs (like the outdoor HP and Lenovo screens) are much less reflective than others, although they can't do direct sunlight.
eInk in all its variants (including PixelQi) is out of the question for my use, as I need to display a live video feed as part of the application.
There's no technical problem to make sunlight readable LCDs - the technique behind the 3M "privacy screens" would work perfectly for that. In fact, I would have been able to use those privacy screens against sunlight, if they weren't embedded in glossy film :(
The market apparently does not exist - the only sunlight readable LCDs one can find come with super-hardened computers that can swim in water and withstand falling from the 6th floor. They cost $3,000 or so, and have a Core 1 Duo, if you are lucky.
I think the author is missing a point here: Macbook Air is a full-blown computer (I run several VMs on mine), while Surface is a freaking tablet.
I am ok with 'wasted' space on a computer, because first, I expect OS to have a substantial footprint, and second - I can see, touch, and actually 'consume' the OS files.
I am not ok with wasted space on a tablet, because to me it is a glorified book reader/mp3 player; I expect to use all the available space for storage.
Wait, you are saying Surface is actually a computer (although a shitty one), not a tablet? Well, then MSFT completely failed to communicate this message. Which is pretty regular problem for MSFT.
> Macbook Air is a full-blown computer (I run several VMs on mine), while Surface is a freaking tablet.
You are wrong. The Surface Pro, which is what we're talking about here, is a full-blown computer just like the MBA. It can run VMs as well. Or any other software you can run on a windows laptop.
Wow, such a long article, about essentially nothing.
About the 2 or 10 base, yes I think it's stupid (living 30yrs with the 2 base) but thats the way it is. MS reports GiB and Apple report GB, so it's wrong to claim both Apple and MS report their capacity in GB.
"The measurements are just expressed differently, in a way that makes Apple look generous and Microsoft look stingy."
Desktops and laptops have already reported drive capacity like this: total capacity before OS + apps. Tablets and smart phones, as they've existed in the marketplace since 2007, advertise available space. Most people think of the Surface as the Windows version of an iPad, not a new form factor for a traditional laptop. As such, they need to be marketed like their cohorts.
Basically the article says: Microsoft lies to you, Apple lies to you and basically everyone is lying to you when it comes to store in hard drives, pen drives, SSD, etc.
At least our bandwidth limitations follow the base we are expecting too, can you imagine you have 100 GB / monthly but for real is 9X something?
I've got a Thinkpad on which I replaced the hard-disk with a 128 GB SSD and installed Ubuntu on it (using fulldisk encryption with dm-crypt / LUKS).
I've got about 100 GB of usable space after having installed a shit ton of apps, libraries and utilities I needed, stuff like Emacs, OpenJDK (with sources), IntelliJ IDEA, RVM with dozens of Java/Scala libraries downloaded through Maven/SBT, dozens of ruby gems, dozens of Python libraries, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Memcached, Gimp, Dropbox, GCC, many header/dev packages, some games and the list can go on.
I should mention that I'm not using a Swap, because I've got enough RAM and as long as I've got Suspend, I don't care about Hibernation.
But I'm talking about Ubuntu 12.10, which is probably the most bloated Linux distribution I ever used. What the hell is in Windows or OS X that takes so much space?
My Windows 8 Pro is 19.2 GiB (on disk). Of which 9.67 GiB is WinSxS. Which is essentially a giant component library containing dozens of different versions of DLLs third party programs use.
1.67 GiB is the driver store. 1.36 GiB is the 32 bit sub-system (SysWoW64). 700 MiB is the .Net framework (versions 1 through 4). So now we're down to 5.94 GiB of "stuff" which we can call the "OS" if you'd like, without any compatibility bits.
Linux is so tiny because Linux has a terrible backwards compatibility record. Fortunately this is hard to spot because the distro's do such a great job of hiding it (and automate much of that via their respective package managers).
But if Linux DID care about backwards compatibility at every level then the OS would be huge too, since you'd need tons of old libraries built in, tons of drivers for redundant hardware, and gunk like that.
One differentiator is that Macs come with iLife suite that are a pretty extensive and popular addition, whereas windows comes with office which is easily replaced for most people with free and/or cloud offerings.
Well most of the people I know in the real world that are casual home computer users get a lot more use out of apps like iPhoto and iMovie than word. Especially because most of them just use Google docs for writing letters.
Love the first graphic and how it twists itself to show the recovery partition on the right side of the graph so the green bar can be as far left as possible. The article lost all credibility at that point.
Possibly, but I think the more likely explanation is that they are obfuscating the fact that the green bar for the Mac 128 is significantly longer than the bar for the Surface 128.
This is stupid. This is like asking which car cabin has the most air volume, and finding that Toyota's larger seats mean its cabin can't hold as much air as Honda's.
Because people like myself cross-shop the Surface Pro against compact ultrabook-class laptops. I have opted to go with Surface Pro because of the added flexibility of its design versus this group I consider to be its competition.
The Ars review of the Surface Pro has more details on disk space:
Unlike Office in Windows RT, this Office is fully uninstallable if you don't like it. Doing so will liberate about 2.3 GB of disk space. Even if you keep Office, you'll have more disk space than Microsoft claims.
How much? The 128 GB Surface Pro has a formatted capacity of 119 (binary) GB and change. A total of 8.4 GB is used for recovery data, of which 7.8 GB can be reclaimed if you prefer to keep your recovery image on external media. This leaves 110.5 GB for the main partition. On a brand new Surface Pro, about 89 (binary) GB are available. Occupying that 20 GB are 3.3 GB of hibernation file, 4 GB of pagefile, 2.3 GB of Office 2013, 10.4 GB of Windows, built-in/default apps, and so on and so forth.
Presuming the sizes of the applications remain comparable on the 64 GB model (with its 59 binary, GB formatted capacity) one would expect to see about 29 GB available by default. Take off Office and the recovery partition and there will be close to 40 GB available.
Which seems to indicate that you can recover 27.8 - 10.4 GB, or 17.4 GB. I'd like to see a chart like that for the Air.
The comparison in the article is with the Macbook Air, which is a laptop, not a laptop/tablet hybrid. I think this is instructive, however. My understanding is that there is no hibernation file and pagefile on an iPad. It's not trying to be a laptop. Likewise, there is no recovery partition on the iPad. (And I see very little need of one.)
The Surface Pro is a laptop in a tablet format. It's basically an old stylus tablet PC from the early 2000's done with 2012 technology, capacitative touch, and some design ideas from iPad style tablets layered on top.
Like my old tc1100 stylus tablet PC, you can use it for the same use cases as an iPad. However, there are important differences:
Holding it in bed would be a bit of a stunt. I can do it with my tc1100 if I rest my elbow on the bed and balance the thing along its diagonal through the center of gravity, with the corner resting firmly in my palm, whereas holding the iPad is like holding a book: something I don't have to think too much about. (That said, the iPad is already at the upper limit of what's tenable for me to not notice weight wise.)
Like the old tc1100, I have to be mindful of vents. A total non-issue with the iPad. I don't know what term there would be for this quality, but it's like a magic slab of touchable light. Having to think about vents ruins that.
Like the old tc1100, I would have to be mindful of battery per work session. To give credit where credit is due, the battery on the Surface Pro lasts 2X as long. However, I can put the tc1100 to sleep and hot-swap battery, so one extra battery gives me as much work endurance.
Basically, they're missing three of the essential qualities that make the iPad great as a tablet. I think they would've done better to go whole hog on the tablet/laptop hybrid idea like the IdeaPad Yoga and the Inspiron Duo. By pretending to be a tablet, they're setting up a bunch of expectations that aren't gong to be met. The tablet/hybrid is good enough for occasionally folding up as a tablet and passing around at a meeting, and doesn't seem to carry expectations beyond that.
Also, what benefit is there to be had from a tablet/laptop hybrid that I couldn't get from an "ultrabook" laptop with an 8.9" tablet? Instead of one device that's mediocre as a tablet and a laptop, I could have two devices that are great in each situation, for little additional weight. (For one thing, I could use the hybrid with a Wacom digitizer to do double duty as a poor-man's Cintiq, but that's kind of niche.)
You are almost right. With enough RAM, a system will work perfectly without swap. There is, however, a small performance penalty. Even with enough RAM, Linux will swap out processes, trying to free memory for use as disk cache. On most cases, this yields performance gains, which would be lost if the swap file is disabled.
Oh? So where do you put swapped-out pages when you go into hibernation? Or would you first need to defragment your page file contents just to dump RAM contents into it? Or keep a map what pages in the pagefile are swapped out and what are just hibernated RAM and then piece stuff together on wake-up again?
You simply swap out all your memory. There's no technical difference between a hibernated page and a swapped out page - the only difference is that the OS normally prevents certain pages (e.g. kernel pages) from being swapped out to preserve performance.
The current state of Virtual Memory is RAM + pagefile/swap partition. The hibernate file would be used to restore just the RAM. You still need the additional pagefile/swap partition to completely come back to that state once you wakeup.
I'm so embarrassed. A week ago I defended that people could be reasonable about Microsoft, their products and the Surface. The comment threads here today have been pathetic. If this is the biggest issue to bitch about regarding the Surface then the Surface Pro 2.0 should be an easy target to nail.
Jesus there are people writing rants in this thread that don't even understand that the Surface Pro is specd similarly to the macbook air (except the surface has a much better screen)
No, you're not. If you were actually curious, you would have bothered to at least skim the article, which spends quite a bit of space talking about the binary vs. decimal definitions of GB.
Author never mentions that treating gigabyte as being equal to 10^9 bytes is actually endorsed by standards organizations such as NIST and IEEE and overall is a better practice. By failing to mention that fact the author implies that Apple is trying to fool us by inflating the reported disk sizes of it's products.
+1. That grated on me a bit, too. While the author does treat the topic extensively, it felt slanted. There's no grand conspiracy: storage manufacturers have traditionally reported capacity in base 10 GB, software in base 2 GiB. So long as the article is internally consistent, so as to compare like units, what does it matter?
He does a lot of things like this. Look at the "main" picture, the graph of storage breakdown. Instead of aligning the sections, he makes it intentionally misleading with that orange block on the right.
I'm not sure why he's being so misleading here, since he would have had a point anyhow.
The guy isn't ranting. The article is matter-of-fact in tone. The mebi-/gibi-/...-byte (metric) definition was standardized rather late (late 90's). By that time the general public was already accustomed to the (now wrong) binary interpretation of a MB or GB.
Also of note: The GB was actually once defined by the IEEE as 1024^3 bytes.
For better or worse, disk manufacturers have been using base 10 megabytes and gigabytes for a couple of decades now. Sure, that switch was marketing driven, but criticizing Apple for eventually switching to the same nomenclature universally used by the storage industry qualifies as a "rant" in my book.
If Apple started doing that for RAM, which is still universally quantified using base 2 gigabytes, now that would be rant-worthy.
With "general public" you mean "computer savvy people who know about number bases and binary in particular" while the "general public" gets on with 1000 GiB = 1 TiB.
Edit: this is factually incorrect. There is also a 64 GB MacBook Air model on offer; I forgot about it. I apologize.
~90 GB of free space on both 128 GB models seems reasonable. Stepping down to just ~26 GB free on the 64 GB model seems unreasonable: the usable capacity is less than half of the advertised capacity.
I feel similarly about the recovery partition discussion. If you remove the recovery image, I presume you will not be able to recover the Surface Pro without additional media. The Macbook Air, on the other hand, will allow you to do a fresh re-installation of OS X over the Internet with a completely blank disk: it's baked into the firmware. Therefore, removing the recovery image results in a feature disparity between the systems. Grumble.