Old place had a bottom freezer. New place has a side-by-side.
Although outside dimensions are about the same, it seems like the old unit held more in both refrig & freezer parts. No way to put a turkey in the side freezer.
The new one has an ice-maker/crusher, which I kind of like, but which I’d readily give up for more space. Also, it’s a pain to get ice from the bin in the new unit; I can barely get my hand in there.
If you want to get REALLY snazzy, your next refrigerator xan have “dual icemakers.” This arrangement works best for the bottom-freezer-top-french door models.
First icemaker is in the refrigerator door, and it delivers ice and cold water through the door. You lose a little bit of refrigerator door storage. The second icemaker is in the bottom freezer, and it just churns out ice. You have to open the freezer to get the ice.
The Son’s refrigerator has the dual icemeker, and everybody is estatically happy with it.
For our refrigerator in AZ, we elected for NO icemaker at all. Even with a reverse-osmosis water filter, our well water has an incredible amount of iron. We just buy bag ice there.
~VOW
And some people like to grow things, and freeze the excess over what they can eat right off in order to have better veggies/fruit to eat in the winter; or just not to have to buy veggies/fruit to eat in the winter.
This; though I’m not particularly concerned about the pizza box as such. But sometimes I want to put something largish in either the fridge or the freezer. (No, not homicide victims. I may be thorny, but I’m not that thorny.)
My preference is bottom refrigerater, small freezer on top of that for items already opened that I’m using part at a time and for ice, and two chest freezers out in the unheated back hall, where in most of the weather we have around here (or at least most of the weather we used to have around here) they’ll stay frozen quite a while if the power goes off.
But different people do indeed have different needs. For instance, I don’t have and don’t want an icemaker; but I don’t use all that much ice. For people who use a lot of ice, I can see the thing being useful.
And if you really like the side-by-side layout but need more space, Frigidaire makes a full-size fridge and a full-size freezer that can be stood next to each other and wrapped with a trim kit that makes the whole thing look like a six foot wide Sub-Zero. I think that $3,000 is for the fridge only…eek!
And of course you need enough space to allow for six feet of space taken by the refrigerator and freezer. I think the French door-style ones with a freezer drawer on the bottom is what I’d get if I had the choice. The side-by-side style seems to have narrow refrigerator space, so things like a large cake, catering tray or pizza box don’t easily fit.
Our side-by-side has a shelf with a cutout so you can fit a frozen pizza in, vertically!
Amurrican ingenuity… /s
We have a freezer-on-top fridge, with the door mounted the “wrong” way blocking the kitchen triangle) because the aperture for the fridge doesn’t allow enough clearance if the door were installed correctly. This also lets out side-by-side, though since we try to reduce plastic and I don’t like the taste of in-door ice cubes and water, there’s not a big draw for that model. We had a chest freezer as well but it was too hard to dig into, so now we have a full-sized freezer and mini-fridge in the garage.
Same. In my perfect setup, which i probably mentioned in the other thread but am too lazy to go look for, is having a full-sized fridge only unit and a full-size stand up freezer, both in the kitchen. I like to have a well-stocked freezer, but I also like to have lots of fresh stuff on hand. We don’t eat a lot of pasta or bread and frankly our kitchen supply of pantry goods is usually small. Some Rubbermaid containers of things like beans, flour, lentils, and the like is about it.
We of course rent so we have a cheap freezer-on-the-top setup with no extra features. The house even has a hookup for an ice maker but the landlord won’t let us install one. We have a stand-up freezer in the garage, which helps some.
That’s what I thought, so that’s what I bought. But I made the mistake of buying it based on reviews and descriptions, and not actually looking at it. The freezer on the bottom is tiny. The drawer LOOKS plenty big, but you know how there’s usually a cut out in the back, behind the vegetable bins, in freezer-on-top models? Well, that’s what we have taking up space that ought to be freezer. 
We keep a lot of ordinary stuff in the freezer of the basement fridge, that I used to just use for parties (fridge part) and longer-term storage of seasonal stuff (freezer.)
We bought one a few years ago. Not sure why, perhaps novelty.
We both completely regret it. The stock freezer on the first third and fridge on the bottom 2/3 is the way to go. Hope ours dies soon so we can go back to tradition.
A few years ago, I had a weekend job doing assisted sales for [redacted] at the blue box store. The one thing I learned was to run away from Samsung fridges as fast and as far as possible. There were always at least a half dozen in the back room waiting to get returned since the customer had returned them. Latter talks with repair people would result in hex signs thrown my way if I mentioned the name, so things haven’t changed.
Most of the ones I saw were big French door units. At the time, Samsung was about the only one making big French doors, too bad they had problems making them work.
I don’t know if ours is larger than average but I throw a turkey into our freezer (like 12lbs, not some 30lb monster) and fit a large pizza box into the fridge – snugly, but it fits.
LG has made some real stinkers as well. Back in February, I scrapped an LG as the “linear” compressor failed just barely out of warranty and finding anyone willing to work on them is nearly impossible.
Yeah, a large pizza box fits in mine just fine. (I would love some pizza, haven’t had any in over 4 months.) Don’t know about a turkey since I’ve never bought one. But the freezer side is about 1/2 the size of the fridge side.
Repair folk tell me the Samsung parts are like Republicans in the MA statehouse–while there are sightings, they are few and far between…
The back room at the Big Blue Box store was telling me that they had problems making it out of the first week, let alone the warranty.
It’s supposed to make it easier to see what’s in the freezer section. I’ve had one for probably thirty years and although it is a hassle to get wide things in either side, it’s not a bad set-up. If I ever have to replace it (and really, at this point maybe I won’t-I mean the thing has been shot for goodness’ sake and it’s still working!) I might go for a French door with a double ice maker.
Simple math will tell you that a side-by-side will have less total interior volume for a given overall size than any form of top/bottom. The divider between the fridge and freezer is the height of the unit in a side-by-side and the width if the unit in a top bottom. Unless your unit is wider than it is tall the divider in a side-by-side will take up more volume.
Add to that the narrow compartments and you get the reason why I have never bought and would never buy a side-by-side.
My LG-made Kenmore Elite failed at the end of May: bad compressor. Luckily it had a ten year warranty, and I only have to pay $450 or so for labor, which wasn’t warrantied. 
The main circuit board failed when it was only a few months old (labor still covered then). Next time I need to lay out for a big repair, I’m going to replace it with a counter-depth unit. This one is much too large.
The Magic Chef in the basement got ice cold within a few minutes, and save our bacon during the three weeks it took Sears to fix the main floor fridge. I don’t even think Magic Chef is a brand any more.
I live in Arizona and have never had water/ice in the door. In fact, I inherited my brother’s side-by-side because while the mechanics were fine, it developed a leak in the waterline that defied two attempts to fix it. It was larger than the one we had already and the refrigerator space in our 50s-era house had no way to easily run a waterline to it.
We pulled all the ice-making gear to gain more space in the freezer half and wound up with nearly twice the cool and frozen space without spending a grand or so. You don’t miss what you never had.
I remember reading the Consumer Reports review of refrigerators, which argued against in-door ice and water dispensers, because they take up space and are a complication better avoided. (Plus the waterline can be a source of a leak, particularly if you use one of those saddle-type DIY connection valves.) And yet, if you look around a big box store, it’s really hard to get a refrigerator without this feature. (I suppose you could make a special order, but almost all of the display units have it.)