The Surface Pro is a PC, so what did you expect?

So yesterday The Verge reported that the 64 GB Surface Pro would only have 23 GB free space left, and all of a sudden the internet pretended to be surprised. Of the many reactions, I think that Marco Arment had the only interesting one, but his “Truth in Advertising” suggestion will likely clash with the ignorance of customers around the world and especially in the USA, so don’t expect anything to happen.

Any why should it? The Surface Pro is a PC, not a Tablet. It has a real, 64-Bit x86 CPU instead of an ARM Chip and it runs a real operating system instead of one of these slimmed down Tablet OSes (Granted, Windows 8 is a vastly inferior version of Windows 7 with a halfway-decent Tablet OS clumsily bolted on, but that’s a different story – it’ll be interesting to see the people always screaming “But we want real Windows apps on our devices!” realizing that almost all real Windows apps until now are meant for Keyboard and Mouse since they have small touch targets, right-click menus and only work well in the default 96dpi).

Have you ever tried to install a real Windows on a 64 GB C: Drive? There is a reason small SSDs aren’t really that popular as boot drives, especially when you consider that the Page- and Hibernation files also take up space (although the small amount of RAM – 4 GB – in the Surface Pro might help a bit).

Once you start installing a few applications, that space will go away just as it would on a normal PC. That’s when you connect an auxiliary storage device (a D: Drive in form of an SD Card) and read up tweaking guides to move stuff around, just like people did when they tried cramming Vista and Win7 on a 64 GB C: Drive.

It will be seen if the Surface Pro is crippled by UEFI Secure Boot like the Surface, thus preventing you from upgrading to Windows 7 or Vista, but if it does, don’t complain since it was your choice to buy such a PC.

I’m not saying that the Surface Pro is a bad product, but you should be aware that you’re not buying a Tablet running an optimized Tablet OS which runs optimized Tablet Apps to give you an optimized Tablet experience. You are buying a Touchscreen Laptop with all Pros and Cons. Which is why the Type Cover is such a good, important and mandatory idea.