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Apple Kicks HDD Marketing Debate Into High Gear
quacking duck writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has updated a support document describing how their new operating system reports capacities of hard drives and other media. It has sided with hard drive makers, who for years have advertised capacities as '1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes' instead of the traditional computer science definition, and in so doing has kicked the debate between marketing and computer science into high gear. Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and endorsed by IEEE and other standards organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance (though manufacturers have wholeheartedly accepted the 'new' definitions for GB and TB). Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt the more awkward binary prefixes, breaking decades of accepted (if technically inaccurate) usage of SI prefixes?"
Apple, kindly takes the confusion away from the average Mac users, who can't be wrap their heads around "complicated" numbers like 1024.
Can't risk being seen as a geek!
Sigs are for the weak.
2^10 aka 1,024 is arbitrary
Are you retarded? That's called math.
this is my sig
Clearly, the 10% market penetration of this hippy operating system is dominating the field. Say what you like about windows, if OS X was superior, wouldn't it be used on more than 1 in 10 of every computer?
If someone went into the store to buy a 2TB disk, only to format it and see that it is only 1.8TB, do you think they are going to call the drive maker, or the OS maker to figure out why it won't format the whole drive?
Yes, they might. I know I've been asked about this from friends, family, and coworkers. "Where does the extra space go?" If you don't understand exactly what's going on (and perhaps even if you do) the whole thing seems confusing and senseless.
Imagine you go to the store and buy a package of 20 cookies, take the package home and open it, and there are only 18. You go back to the grocery store and they say, "Yeah, all packages of cookies are like that. If you buy a package of 1,000 cookies, you get 890 cookies in it. That's just the way it works." Wouldn't that seem a little silly?
I think Apple just is attempting to make it easier for non-computer folks to understand, and less calls for them.
Do you think there's something wrong with that? (I'm seriously asking. I can't tell from your post whether you think it's a bad thing for Apple to be doing.)