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.
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.