Microsoft is taking heat for claiming more user-available disk space on its new ARM-based Windows 8-powered Surface tablet than is really there.

But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Most companies are lying in their commercials, product pages, and press releases when it comes to how much disk space their gadgets offer users. This isn’t as big a deal for the kind of person who reads Alex Wilhelm at The Next Web. But for my parents, looking to buy a tablet, it is a non-trivial deception.

The deception actually works against the companies that use it: I suggest that many people may consider the larger model if the true size of the smaller model were more apparent.