An unhappy lawyer of Los Angeles is suing Microsoft, claiming the Surface tablet he bought doesn’t have all the storage space the company advertised. Andrew Sokolowski says 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.
That’s because the 32 GB Surface uses up half of its storage space for the operating system as well as pre-installed apps. The 64 GB Surface also has just 46 GB of free space.
Sokolowski filed the suit Tuesday at the Superior Court in Los Angeles. He is seeking class action status. Microsoft says on its website that the 32GB Surface has 16GB of free space while the 64GB version has 45GB free. Sokolowski is not seeking damages but wants Microsoft to stop what he says is a misrepresentation of the Surface’s features and refund buyers of the tablet.
“Mr. Sokolowski’s lawsuit is about protecting consumers as we head into the holiday shopping season,” Rhett Francisco, an attorney representing Sokolowski, told The Times. “Microsoft is misrepresenting the storage capacity and capabilities of the Surface tablet, and consumers should know about it.”
In response, Microsoft said that they believe the lawsuit 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,” a Microsoft spokeswoman told The Times. “Surface with Windows RT customers benefit from the ability to attach additional storage via the integrated microSD slot or full-size USB port.”
