I know! How dare an OS and its applications take up space on the hard drive! This is certainly unprecedented and has never happened in the history of PC's and laptops.

Thank you for your intelligent post. Hey look now we are both being sarcastic.

Selling a device advertised as 64GB of storage with only 20GB~ free IS a problem. Its horribly misleading.

There is nothing misleading about it. There is 64GB of storage, and if you want to use more of the available space, remove some of the software it comes with.

If you wish for intelligent discussion, how about we discuss a more interesting topic. How much free space should be expected? Should a non-techy device such as the Surface sacrifice space in order to make their user experience better? Where do you draw the line?

Alright its not misleading, but it is strange. I know someone will call me out for comparing the iPad and Surface Pro, but if both devices are priced as "64 GB tablets" when you turn on your iPad you get ~55GB. The surface pro reportedly has only 23GB available. That's less than half. Look at it the way, you can buy a 32 GB iPad, magically get a Mountain Lion install on there, and be left with just about the same amount of free space.

Imagine they were selling water bottles. Apple/Android's waterball was 8" tall and has a shape such that 6% of the shape of cylindrical shape doesn't actually hold water. MS sells you the same thing however the water bottle is half the size, for the same price. Most people will just shrug off the 6% as a "Fact of life", but over 50% and that's just wrong. As another user commented, an imaginary fuzzy line between "fair" and ripped off has just been crossed.

One should expect how ever much is advertised. In this case 64GB's of storage is advertised implying there is 64GB's of storage accessible to the user.

Of course we have NEVER had the full space advertised by storage devices accessible for a multitude of reasons. We mainly go along with this because its advertising. But thats my point here, the advertising is getting out of hand, when you get a device and you have less then 1/2 of the advertised space that SHOULD be a problem.

On a side note the Surface and much less Surface PRO are no longer "techy" devices? I don't necessarily agree with that, but that and your statement are both opinions.

> One should expect how ever much is advertised.

No, one shouldn't, because that hasn't been true of any comparable electronic device or computer in the last 5 years. You confirm this in your next paragraph, so I don't understand why you included the first paragraph.

It's not "just advertising." There truly is a 64GB chip in the device.

Yeah, remove the software... Your choice is to remove the OS or the recovery partition. Awesome choices right there.

It's no more misleading than advertising 64GB of storage with only 63.5GB free.

(Shrug) Other people are doing a better job. Microsoft hasn't had to compete in the OS space for a long time; now they do.

You forget that most Linux distros take up much less space than windows.

You forget we are talking about the Microsoft Surface tablet - A non-techy device with a target demographic of completely different users with different needs. Apples and oranges.