The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Those who support this change are bringing up two points that have no logical basis.

First of all, for anyone to say that "It started with computer types INCORRECTLY using the previously word existing "kilo" to mean 1024." is laughable, and demonstrates a level of ignorance that is hard not to pity.

Computer storage and addressing has NEVER been metric, and never will be (unless someone goes back to square-one and reinvents computers based on a system of 10s... in which case we will have to trash all of our current computers, software, hard drives, etc.).

Second, the IEEE is not a holy spirit that sees and knows all. It is a group of people who make decisions on technical standards for marketing purposes. Sometimes their decisions make a lot of sense, but other times (such as in this instance) they don't!

What the IEEE is doing with this decision, at the pressuring of the hard drive manufacturers, is to change the long-standing, reality-based binary system of sizing hard drives (to what they have been getting away with for the past 10 years) so that they can make more money by selling their products at inflated, unrealistic sizes.

If you are supporting this and enjoy being ripped off by buying a "1TB" hard drive that is really only 930 GB in size, then it's hard to understand your point of view.

As much as it is an IEEE supported standard, instigated by the hard drive manufacturers, it is still not based on anything approaching reality.

The reality is that computers (and hard drives) always have been binary systems, NOT base-10. Saying that you are doing this to go metric and/or be less confusing to people also is unrealistic.

Hard drives are made up of sectors/blocks of 512 bytes (2 to the 9th bytes) or 1024 bytes (2 to the 10th bytes) (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector). These are the smallest units that make up a hard drive. There is no such thing as a 1000 byte (10 to the 3rd) sector.

It is therefore IMPOSSIBLE for hard drive manufacturers to make a hard drive that actually uses their own measuring of "1TB" (1,000,000,000,000 bytes). They are stuck in reality having to make hard drives that use the binary system, NOT the base-10 system!

This is why an advertised "1 TB" hard drive is 1,000,204,886,016 bytes in actual size (not 1,000,000,000,000 bytes). There is no amount of IEEE decision making that can ever make a hard drive base-10. Repeat... It is IMPOSSIBLE.

When you buy a "1TB" hard drive you are only getting a bit more than 90% of a real 1 TB.

And just remember that the gap between what the hard drive manufacturers sell you and the actual number of bytes you think you are buying will widen as time goes by.

With each progression to a new order of measurement, (MegaBytes, GigaBytes, TeraBytes, PetaBytes, ExaBytes, etc.) that difference gets bigger and bigger; meaning more savings for the hard drive manufacturers and the less you are getting when you buy a hard drive.

For example the difference between a real kilobyte (1024 bytes) and 1000 bytes is only a 2.4% difference. But the difference at the TeraByte level (1,099,511,627,776 bytes vs. 1,000,000,000,000 bytes) jumps way up to a much larger 10% loss! And this loss will get greater and greater exponentially into the future.

In other words: Reality Bytes.

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"Computer storage and addressing has NEVER been metric"

Storage certainly has. Read through some old hard drive specs from the dawn of computing. Even drum memories (precursor to hard drives) were measured in metric kilobytes. Measuring disks as multiples of 1024 is simply wrong.

"unless someone goes back to square-one and reinvents computers based on a system of 10s"

Your ignorance is showing. The first computers WERE based on a system of 10s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_computer

The "hard drive manufacturers are ripping us off!!!!" argument is about as dumb as it gets.

And your "dozen" analogy is totally wrong. Check out footnote #2: http://www.wdc.com/settlement/docs/document20.htm#_ftn2

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There's more to an OS upgrade than porn vids and pics, sir.

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Hold on. If you're comparing file sizes to see if it's the same size as the one you have, then you need to know the size in bytes. That's not changing.

One system may say 1 K, and the other system may say 1.024 K, but they'll both say 1,024 bytes.

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If you need to compare files, you should consider doing a checksum. It shouldn't be very difficult to create an AppleScript that takes a set of files or a folder, calculates a SHA-1 checksum of the files and checks them for equality.

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Windows, Linux, even the UNIX system running under Snow Leopard report Gigabytes as 1,024 MB... NOT 1,000 MB! And RAM manufacturers do the same. It is only 10 years ago that hard drive manufacturers started selling us less than what they advertised. They probably saw that they could make a lot of money this way. They also must have seen that as hard drives increase in size, the less proportionally they could sell as an advertised hard drive size because the difference between the true binary sizes and their base-10 sizes becomes exponentially larger.

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Hard drive manufacturers don't misrepresent anything. They state on the packages that they calculate drive capacity by powers of 10. OSes have always calculated by powers of 2, hence the "discrepancy." The usable space between the two is the same, much like 500ml bottles come in 16.9oz sizes, too!

Apple is just riding the marketing wave caused by the ignorance of consumers.

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This article is pure bull. For example:
"It's been traumatic for some, having a psychological effect similar to Pluto losing its status as a full-fledged planet."

This is the wrong analogy. An appropriate analogy would be going into a grocery store to buy a dozen (12) buns. But one day you go into the store, pay the same amount for a dozen buns, but you are given 10 buns. The grocer tells you that this is the new "dozen", and so the price is the same as before.

Would you feel ripped off? Of course you would.

It was the hard drive manufacturers that came out with this new way of calculating disk sizes in order to convince us we were buying hard drives of a certain size when in fact they were smaller than the advertised size. Unfortunately, Apple is now going along with this sham.

It's only in recent years that hard drive manufacturers colluded with one another to change the way it sized hard drive capacities. Most people, such as myself, can remember when hard drives were sold in real MegaByte and GigaByte sizes. They only created this new "dozen" in order to sell us less for the price of what we would have been buying previously.

Being ripped off like this should make you very angry. Yet we get an article like this trying to convince us that these new smaller measurements were there all along and that they are correct. They are not!!!

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I completely agree. All Apple has done is bring technology inline with marketing. I would rather have seen the reverse...

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Considering all physical media and network media are measured in base-10, there really is no reason to specify capacity in base-2. This was left over from a bad design decision in historical Operating Systems. Inevitably, there will be some backlash, but this is a needed and welcome change.

Most people barely know the difference between Giga or Mega anyway; why complicate things. If a person purchases a 500GB disk, they should reasonably expect it to show up as 500GB capacity. INTERNAL computer processes and storage certainly make use of the binary system but why expose that to people that are used to a decimal measurement system. Most people don't care to know how the computer works internally; it should just be an easy-to-use tool.

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@harveylubin: I think you're analogy is backwards. Prior to Snow Leopard, capacities were reported in base-2 by all Operating Systems. So, when you installed a 500 GB drive it would show up as only 465 GB (Less). Now, all interfaces use the same scale to report the same size: 500GB.

So, I would have felt ripped off, as in your analogy, PRIOR to the change.

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@Anderson: You wrote:
"So, I would have felt ripped off, as in your analogy, PRIOR to the change."

Your logic is backwards. Before the hard drive manufacturers turned away from using correct base-2 sizes, if you bought for example a 1GB hard drive and took it home it was a full 1GB of storage (as advertised).

After the change to non-standard sizing, the same hard drive would have been sold as 1.2GB but when you took it home it was (what it was before) only 1GB.

You didn't feel ripped off "PRIOR to the change."

You do feel ripped off NOW!

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Yes and strangely Activity Monitor still reports memory size in "Gb", while it's actually giving the value in Gib ! So the whole thing isn't internally consistent anymore, now we'll have to guess which calculation lies behind the prefix.

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@harveylubin,

Wrong on the dozen buns thing. It would be like you walking into a bakery, ordering a dozen buns and being given C buns instead, heaven forbid they give you 1100 in their place.

Your pissed because you don't understand the difference between the systems of measurement.

Remember, there are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who done. Apple has recognized that most people are in the latter.

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