Snow Leopards most fundamental change went mostly unnoticed

[rpp3po]

Apple redefined the Gigabyte from 1073741824 to 1000000000. Finally!!! I'm into computer science since over two decades and that never made sense.

 

[NT1440]

There is a massive thread with much bloodshed on this already.

 

[nick9191]

They did it because newbies keep installing hard drives and wondering where some of their space is, "I bought this 320gb and it's only giving me 298gb".

I don't care what anyone says, it's not correct.

 

[Hellhammer]

This is just a visual change, the physical size is still the same

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

We actually have nine pages about this.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/721173/

Really unnoticed...

 

[Aranince]

If that doesn't make sense...then you're really not into computer science.

 

[macfanboy]

this didnt go unnoticed

EDIT: does ITUNES report iphone and ipods as their respective sizes? for example, does it show 16 GB instead of 14.7 GB?

 

[NT1440]

Isn't it still the same amount of space storage wise, just reported differently?

 

[grodgers]

If that doesn't make sense...then you're really not into computer science.

Exactly...

 

[bobrik]

If that doesn't make sense...then you're really not into computer science.

No. It makes great sense in CS to count in powers of 2. But it makes no sense to call 1024 with prefix (kilo) which already means 1000.

 

[rpp3po]

If that doesn't make sense...then you're really not into computer science.

Bllsht! It used to make sense 20 years ago to build 1024 byte RAM cells instead of 1000 byte RAM cells. And it also used to make sense to call such a RAM cell a one kilobyte RAM cell. What's the advantage of this arbitrary choice for hard disks? Their sizes never aligned to power of 2 sizes anyway. Their capacity was limited by the number and size of platters and their density. Their were not build in blocks of power of 2 sized elements.

If you are into computer science you will be certainly able to tell? Which calculation, algorithm, or alignment issue would be at all affected if kilo, mega, giga, and terabyte sizes for hard disks would be counted in base 10 increments?

Oh, I see there's actually already the mentioned 9 page thread and this 3 page thread, where I have just posted a more detailed answer. Hardly "unnoticed".