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Apple has changed the way they calculate 1GB - this is documented. It also explains why the capacity of your disk has gone up.

on August 29, 2009 at 02:56 PM - LINK

@Jake: That’s 24 bytes per kilobyte, 24 kilobytes per megabyte, though I’m sure you know that & it’s just a typo ;-)

Gotta say I’m not a fan of this decision, I think it’s completely nuts and nonsensical.  Apple stand completely alone in using this base 10 method of reporting disk space, and even then it’s literally only the Finder that does it.  Look anywhere else on your shiny new Snow Leopard system and it’s all still base 2 - iTunes, Quicktime, Terminal… even MobileMe.

Now if that doesn’t confuse the hell out of a lot of people I don’t know what will, especially when people notice that the 200MB .dmg they just created is reported in Finder (*on the same machine*) to be 204.8MB big, and the 4.7GB movie they just downloaded (and paid for, naturally) suddenly takes up about 4.928GB of their precious HDD space.
Then they upload a file that Finder tells them is a nice round 200MB, but when it arrives on the server it is reported to be only 195.31MB - err, did the upload quit prematurely?  Is my file all there or what?

There are an awful lot of people arguing about this on many websites & forums.  Some people are taking the stance that Apple are correct because the kilo prefix means 1000, so ‘strictly speaking’ this is the proper way to report data sizes.  BUT there are plenty of very good reasons why I personally, along with a great many other people, am taking the opposite stance.

Here are a few:

1. Almost the entire world thinks about 1 kilobyte as being made up of 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes, etc.  It has been that way for nearly half a century, since engineers and computer scientists decided that these terms are nice ‘n’ friendly, convenient, and not all that far off.  This convention is ingrained in, accepted and used by everyone except the hard disk marketers, who only adopted the use of base 10 to make their drives appear to be bigger than they actually are.  They must field hundreds of support enquiries per day as to why somebody’s brand new 500GB hard drive only shows up as about 488GB once installed in their computer.
Yes, about 10 years ago the various standards bodies came up with alternatives/replacements to these units - the kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, etc. - but nobody asked for them and these terms just haven’t caught on, not at all.  We’re all happy with our kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes thank you very much.
To this day most people have never even heard of these ‘new’ terms, and it’s not surprising.  40 years is a long time for a convention to take hold in a growing, learning culture of PC users, and for these standards bodies to expect everyone to accept a sudden redefinition of a whole set of terms is, in my opinion, extremely arrogant and short sighted.

2. Sure, it could be argued that the adoption of base 10 could help clear up confusion with users who aren’t aware of the number of bytes in a ‘traditional’ kilobyte.  But unless the entire world changes all at once, including every web server, every operating system, every application, every book on the subject and thousands of websites too, there can be only *more* confusion (as partially illustrated at the beginning of this post).  Simply moving a file, or storage device, from Snow Leopard to any other current OS (and vice versa, of course) will show a discrepancy in size or capacity, causing confusion also.

3. It is not helpful to describe disk space or file size in base 10.  The smallest physical storage space on any hard disk drive is called a sector, and these are almost always 512 bytes in size, regardless of the capacity of the drive.  1 sector can store 512 bytes, so 2 sectors can store 1024 bytes (or 1 ‘old’ kilobyte - fits nicely doesn’t it?).  Further, in order to store 1000 bytes of information (or 1 of these new ‘metric kilobytes’, if you will), 2 sectors will still be used, as these are the smallest possible space on any disk, and this is where it becomes clear that describing 1 kilobyte as 1,000 bytes is just plain weird.

In my opinion (and many others’, too) it is not us who need to change our habits, or conventions, or understanding.  We are all perfectly happy with our kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes.  It is the storage device marketers who should describe the size/capacity of the devices they are selling using terms that are relevant to the use the devices are intended for - i.e. being installed into computers whose operating systems and their applications ALL count bytes in multiples of 1024 and report them as such.

Of course the exception to this is Apple with Snow Leopard, but then we have to remember that Apple is also a hardware manufacturer, who also uses base 10 counting to artificially inflate the marketed storage capacity of its products.  Becoming clearer now?
Apple recently lost a lawsuit over the fact that their iPods and iPhones, while being marketed as having certain capacities (i.e. 8GB, 16GB, etc.), showed less capacity than was printed on the box once plugged into any computer, including Apple’s own.

In response, rather than change the ‘claimed’ capacity on the boxes of these devices to reflect the ‘real’ capacity (as reported by theirs and all other current operating systems), Apple have changed the way their new operating system reports this capacity - to match the marketing.

I am not a cynical person, but this seems to be the only logical explanation.  Otherwise, would they not have made some sort of fanfare about this?  They could have used it in their advertising campaigns - e.g. If you buy a Mac, you’ll be able to access all of your 500GB hard drive.  PC’s rob you of storage!

Who knows, maybe that’s in the pipeline…

on September 2, 2009 at 10:57 PM - LINK