Lawyer sues Microsoft rather than slot an SD card into his Surface
This thing isn't made by Apple, you know
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
A lawyer is suing Microsoft for false advertising after his 32GB Surface slab turned up with 16GB of free space.
Andrew Sokolowski claims that he quickly ran out of storage capacity on the tablet when he was loading it with music and documents because half the flash memory was filled by the operating system and pre-installed apps such as Word and Excel.
The ruffled California brief accused Microsoft of unfair business practices as well as false advertising in Los Angeles' Superior Court, the Associated Press reported.
Sokolowski has demanded changes to Surface adverts and damages. Microsoft has refuted the suit's claims, and said it was perfectly clear to folks what they were getting when they bought the fondletop.
"Customers understand the operating system and pre-installed applications reside on the device's internal storage thereby reducing the total free space," the company said. Its website does state there will be 16GB of space free on the 32GB model, and 45GB on the 64GB version, in the small print of the technical specs.
But Sokolowski's lawyers said those details are hard to find on the website and he never saw them.
It's unlikely that argument will stand up since all mobiles and tablets come with little less capacity than the headline storage figure thanks to the presence of bundled software. And hard disks are marketed with capacities in multiples of 1,000 bytes, whereas you'd be forgiven for expecting blocks of 1,024 bytes as is normal for memory, leading to a lower capacity than advertised.
And as Microsoft pointed out, it would be a simple and inexpensive matter for Sokolowski to add large amounts of memory to his fondletop by simply slotting in a microSD card.
Sokolowski hopes, however, that his complaint will gain class-action status. ®
COMMENTS
Re: What a load of crap.
As noted, it does say (somewhere) that there is less than the full amount available as free space... and to be fair, every device since the dawn of computing that was sold as having X amount of space available also had the OS and accompanying programs installed, using some of that 'free space'. I think Microsoft should give him a new tablet (in trade), with exactly as much free space as suggested - no OS, no programs, nothing. Just a big, blank chunk of flash. Doesn't run? Who cares! Think of all that space you could have been using if you weren't such an idiot!
They all cheered the T-Rex
When it ate the lawyer in the movie Jurassic Park.
Sorry but I don't agree with your point of view - we can all accept a few GB less space than is advertised for one reason or another - but HALF the space that is advertised is not acceptable. Personally - I don't see this as any different to the headline broadband speeds issue - tell the customer what they are getting - not what they aren't.
If this was me - I'd be willing to accept the loss of 5 - 8GB of the internal space.... but this makes me wonder - just how much internal space will be eaten when each update comes out.... You could probably expect that you will lose at least another 2GB over the next year of updates?
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
