Thursday, 15 November 2012 19:42

Microsoft sued because of Surface Memory Capacity

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Even before the arrival to the market it was known that a big part of the internal flash memory of Surface is reserved for Windows alone and applications that come preloaded on the device. Thus, a 32-gigabyte version has only about 16 GB of free space for user data. That was reason enough for California Attorney General Andrew Sokolowski to sue Microsoft. In fact, he bought the Surface (RT) with 32 gigabytes of internal memory, but the internal memory got filled very fast with music and documents and then he realized that he actually has only half the space than he thought it should have.

Therefore, he decided to file a lawsuit against Microsoft for false advertising and unfair business practices. His goal is to change the Microsoft method of advertising of their devices, and make the company to return the money they earned by selling these devices. Microsoft justifies by claiming that customers realize that the operating system and preloaded applications are placed on the internal memory and that the whole 32GB of space wont be available. They also announced on the 5th of November exactly how much free space there is on each Surface version (32 gigabyte has a 16 gigabyte and 64 gigabyte has 45 gigabytes).

However, the information is buried on the Microsoft site and is not included in the specifications of those devices.  There is also the question of the unit for the amount of data (kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte ...), or if they have taken one kilobyte as 1000 bytes (a typical case for specifying capacity of drives, flash memory, etc.) or 1,024 bytes (a typical case for many operating systems such as Windows). Therefore, when looking in Windows the capacity of internal flash memory, hard disk or SSD, it turns out that you have a lack of memory - and the thing is variously defined units. Now it's just a question of whether customers really understand that the operating system and applications can take up so much of the internal memory.

It is worth mentioning that a similar situation is present with the other devices, like the iPad. However, because the iPad's operating system takes up relatively little space, the difference between the declared and the free space is much lower (14.3 GB free of 16 GB).

What do you think about Microsoft's blunder here, was it intnetional? Tell us in our Forum

Read 3160 times Last modified on Thursday, 15 November 2012 19:50

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