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2 sept. 2009

“Snow Leopard ditches real math for fake”

if you have a 500,000,000 byte drive, base 10 math would call that a 500gb drive, but base 2 math would call that 476.8gb.

we understand why hard drive manufacturers use the base 10 system; larger sounding drives sell better. now we find out that osx 10.6 snow leopard is using base 10 math to calculate storage space. while base 2 math is the standard storage measurement for operating systems it may at first be difficult to understand why apple would change to a base 10 system. but think about it once more, doesn’t apple have a lot to gain if all the storage-containing-hardware they sell sounds bigger than it actually is?

It’s a very valid point that Apple has a vested interest, as a hardware maker, in making an operating system that makes hard drives look bigger. But:

  • hard drive manufacturers aren’t ever going to move (back?) to base 2, so isn’t it just as well that OSes start using the same math as them anyway?

  • computers are vaguely supposed to be designed for users, rather than the other way around, so what’s the rationale exactly for why base 10 would be the right way to measure how big a drive is?

I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t benefit a little too directly from the change to be honest — but, in the grand scheme of things, it just simplifies things for the user, so that makes it a mostly good thing, doesn’t it?

 

(Reading the comments makes me realize that maybe whoever originally decided that 1kB would be be 1024 bytes might have been so quick to disregard what “kilo” is usually supposed to mean because they didn’t use the metric system personally, so they didn’t figure how confusing it might be. Also, lots of interesting comments on the post I linked.)

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