Inspired by this
I am Ricardo Lopez, Test Manager for Surface RT. After the OS,
OfficeRT and a bunch of apps, you will still have more that 20GB. As
you say, you can always add an SD card and while you cannot add apps
there, you can get music, movies and photos there.
That Reddit comment is referring to the 32GB Microsoft Surface RT. Assuming everything, that means that Windows RT, OfficeRT, and a few small apps, the "light" version of Windows 8 requires around 12GB.
Does anyone have any data as to how iOS compares? How much space does iOS require?
I know that it does not cut into the storage allocated for the user (i.e. a 16GB iPhone will offer almost that much to the user). Data on iOS 6 is preferred.
Best Answer
The exact answer will vary by device, because there are separate iOS builds for each one. The easiest way to figure this out is to examine an iOS 6 install image (a
.ipswfile).The iPad 3 (Wi-Fi only) is the iOS device that is most similar to a Microsoft Surface, although the two are still very different. The iOS 6.0 (build 10A403) install image weighs in at around 1.15 GB.
The IPSW file itself is actually a zip file that contains several files, but most of them are fairly small. The root filesystem disk image, which contains the entire installed OS, weighs in at around 1.12 GB in this case.
Someone with a jailbroken device could decrypt the image and provide a more exact answer, that's a pretty good estimate of the amount of space it will consume on the device when installed.