One Reason Why I Won't Upgrade To Snow Leopard
While this change represents correct usage of the SI prefixes, it also means Snow Leopard will be reporting file sizes and disk capacities in a fashion different from every other operating system out there. If Apple wanted to be more technically accurate, they should have switched to the KiB/MiB/GiB/TiB standards, which would still present file sizes and disk capacities that would be numerically identical on other platforms and systems.
This is nothing short of completely idiotic on Apple’s part, and it’s only real purpose seems to avoid technical support calls asking why a 200 GB disk is reported as 185.99 GB. Hard drive makers are to blame too, of course, but at least those inconsistencies have been accepted for years. It’s the one time the marketing drones get the technical facts correct, and I still hate them for it…
(Link via Slashdot)
Is this how we supposedly gain 7-15GB of new drive space after install? This is pretty stupid. For Apple to go ass-backwards and follow the HDD industry is inane and completely self-serving on a support level.
I haven’t actually done it yet, but I’d guess at least some of the higher than 7 GB figures reported are per the new definition. That raises an interesting question as to whether or not Apple itself is even consistent with their new terminology: Is that 7 billion bytes, or 7,516,192,768 bytes? 500 megabytes (or mebibytes) is nothing to sneeze out. And what about instances where a piece of software says it needs “2 GB” (really 2 GiB) to install, and OS X reports “2 GB” (really 2 SI-ized GB) available, when, in fact, they’re about 140 MB short? The more I think about this, the more it pisses me off. I don’t particularly care whether Apple offers an option to revert to the traditional storage measurement definitions, or even an option to report usage in KiB/MiB/GiB/TiB, as long as they do it.
