16 gb iPhone 4 is only 14

[Statusnone88]

Actually 1 gigabyte (GB) is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The 1,073,741,824 measurement you're referring to is actually a gibibyte. (GiB) These are IEEE's standards, not Apple's.

However, if Apple continues to list the capacity in GiB, they really should label it as such, or go the other route and convert the number to actual gigabytes (which is how they're erroneously labeling it). Otherwise people will keep getting confused.

Snow Leopard introduced proper GB measurements after all, they should really incorporate it into iOS.

Learn something new every day. I wasn't aware this was an industry standard, not just apple. Thank you for the info

 

[Applejuiced]

Obviously you're not very keen on how storage mediums in electronics work...

You never have access to the full capacity of a storage device because a section of the memory is partitioned off to the OS. This applies to basically any storage medium out there.

Thats not why.
The OS is only 700mb not 2GB.
Read the other comments below and above to learn about the way GB's and storage in general is measured and reported.

 

[Professor Davey]

The missing 2GB is where the magic is kept.

You made my day, bahaha.

 

[adztaylor]

Just another reason to get a 32gig

But mine only says 29.1gig!

 

[SpaceKitty]

Actually 1 gigabyte (GB) is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The 1,073,741,824 measurement you're referring to is actually a gibibyte. (GiB) These are IEEE's standards, not Apple's.

However, if Apple continues to list the capacity in GiB, they really should label it as such, or go the other route and convert the number to actual gigabytes (which is how they're erroneously labeling it). Otherwise people will keep getting confused.

Snow Leopard introduced proper GB measurements after all, they should really incorporate it into iOS.

The whole computer industry needs to stop doing this, it's not just Apple. The hard drive manufacturers themselves do this, Microsofts opersting systems do this, Apple does this though Snow Leopard reports an HD such as 1TB as being 999.73GB which is pretty close.

Check out what your OS says that the capacity of your hard drive is.