LOS ANGELES – A California lawyer is suing Microsoft Corp., claiming the Surface tablet he bought doesn’t have all the storage space the company advertised.
Andrew Sokolowski, a lawyer in Los Angeles, claims that he bought a Surface with 32 gigabytes of storage last week. But he quickly ran out of space after loading it with music and Microsoft Word documents.
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He discovered that a significant portion of the 32 GB storage space was being used by the operating system and pre-installed apps such as Word and Excel. Only 16 GB was available for him to use.
Sokolowski’s lawyers filed the suit alleging false advertising and unfair business practices on Tuesday at the Superior Court in Los Angeles. They are seeking class action status.
The suit aims to change how Microsoft advertises its device and hopes to force the company to give back profits that resulted from its alleged wrongful conduct.
Microsoft said in a statement that it believes the suit is without merit.
“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. It noted that people can add storage via the microSD slot and USB port.
Microsoft confirmed on Nov. 5 exactly how much usable storage space its Surface tablets come with out of the box. It says on its website that the 32 GB Surface has 16 GB of free space while the 64 GB version has 45 GB free. The Surface started selling Oct. 26 and Sokolowski bought his device on Nov. 7.
In comparison, even if Microsoft’s base-model Surface only has 16 GB of memory available, that’s still slightly more than the 14.3 GB you’ll get from the latest Wi-Fi only iPad for the same price of $499.
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