Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
That's how device storage has been marketed since computers have been sold. They tell you how much storage is in the device. Your Windows computer and Mac are the same. If you buy a 1tb laptop it's less than that after Windows is installed.
That's really the best way to do it because even though most people will never change their OS some people will. In earlier days when these customs were being formed a lot more people did change their OS.
To make things more confusing there's no real agreement on the meaning of a terabyte or a megabyte or a gigabyte. Computer things are measured in powers of two because computers are binary. Humans like to do things in powers of 10, probably because we have 10 fingers. A kilobyte, 1k, is 1024 bytes. That's a round number in binary but humans tend to want round numbers in decimal so it's often looked at as 1000.
So compromises are made and some people say a megabyte is 1k times 1k or 1,048,576. Others say it's 1000k or 1,024,000. And a gigabyte is either 1000 megabytes or 1024 megabytes. The same thing happens with a terabyte. Hardware vendors tend to use the lower numbers, or 1000 times a kilobyte. Software vendors usually use the higher numbers.
Yeah marketing people tend to cheat a lot in the way they use terminology and there are lots of examples of it but this particular example is so confused that my guess is it just sort of happened and nobody argued. I'm not convinced anyone is really cheating with size terminology. They're just following the custom.
If anyone else has anything simple like this they'd like me to confuse, let me know and I'll give it a shot. I seem to be pretty good at it. 
Barry |
^That plus the Gigabyte/Gibibyte confusion
