Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:03 am

'Bout time. This has chapped my hide for years. It's like when manufacturers were selling 15" monitors where you could only see / use 13.5" of screen real estate. What good's 1.5" of hidden monitor, and why was that a selling point? Turns out it wasn't and the courts did us a favor on that one. I really hate the fact that so many hard drive manufacturers consider 1000 mb = 1gb.... basically stealing 24 mb / gb. It's fine if they wanna decide that 1000mb=1gb, but they damn well need to change the OS software to display EVERYTHING using metric GB instead of actual GB. That way all of my mp3 files are 3.6mb instead of 3.2 or whatever.

I like his 7.5% refund idea. That's clever.

Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:38 am

This is why I keep saying that suing Apple is this falls big fad. If this guy wanted to do something good then go after Seagate or Toshiba. They are the ones that make the drives and the claims. Apple, Dell, HP, et. al. just pass the claims on. It's an accepted industry practice to use unformatted capacity. If he did want to go after the makers of the end products then Dell and HP sell a lot more computers than Apple. but if you sue Dell nobody notices. Suing Apple gets your name in the press.

I see many years of ambulance chasing and weasely, marginally ethical legal tactics in this boys future.

I just had a thought though: Could it be that he's doing this as some kind of law school project?

Fri Oct 19, 2007 11:06 am

Just wait until law students learn about allocation blocks and then metadata. The possibilities are endless!

Fri Oct 19, 2007 12:25 pm

Just once I'd like to see a headline "Apple files class action suit against lawyers for being stupid."

Just once!

Fri Oct 19, 2007 1:56 pm

The dual-meaning of "GB" has bugged me for ages, but as has been stated, it's not Apple's problem. The whole industry does this. I'm surprised that this is about the nano, which is flash-based. I thought flash drives were typically measured in binary GB (i.e., 1GB = 2^30 bytes; AKA "GiB"), like RAM. *shrug*

When I was a kid it bugged me that the price tags on supermarket items did not include applicable sales tax. I got over it.

What bugs me most is DVDs. CDs were always advertised with binary megabytes. A "700MB" CD actually holds more than 700*2^20 bytes, but a "4.7GB" DVD only holds 4.38*2^30 bytes. The standard switched. But again, I've gotten over it. And all without suing anyone.

It's worth noting that outside of the world of computers, these prefixes always mean 1000, 1,000,000, etc.

Fri Oct 19, 2007 3:20 pm

agreed, let's fix the 2x4 issue as well. And lemmee tell you, I'm going to run to the office for my ruler... I have some suspicious 3x5 index cards sitting around as well.

START THE LEGAL MACHINE!!!!!

Fri Oct 19, 2007 4:40 pm

So wait, you're ad-homineming me over my "anxiety" about storage space, telling me to chill because of this anxiety? I could be mistaken, but I'm sensing some anxiety on your part about my anxiety? Glass houses, stones, etc. You don't need to care about what I care about, but I'm thrilled that you do, it's a nice feeling to be loved. Far be it from me to turn down free analysis & opinions, so please help me dissect some additional issues;

1. Overwhelming concern over lightswitches pointing up when the light is turned off rather than down.

2. Discomfort at paying $.25 for an "air" token at the gas station.

3. Disgust at the idea that the applications on my hard drive are filled with language files for countries i've never heard of.

Do you work hourly or by session?

<topic>agreed it's a stupid suit.</topic>

Oh, and storage is cheaper than dirt, and I don't care much about it, but iPod storage is not as plentiful or available as a regular drive.

Fri Oct 19, 2007 7:59 pm

Then we're in agreement then. Excellent.

Fri Oct 19, 2007 9:02 pm

geoduck wrote:

This is why I keep saying that suing Apple is this falls big fad. If this guy wanted to do something good then go after Seagate or Toshiba. They are the ones that make the drives and the claims. Apple, Dell, HP, et. al. just pass the claims on. It's an accepted industry practice to use unformatted capacity. If he did want to go after the makers of the end products then Dell and HP sell a lot more computers than Apple. but if you sue Dell nobody notices. Suing Apple gets your name in the press. I see many years of ambulance chasing and weasely, marginally ethical legal tactics in this boys future. I just had a thought though: Could it be that he's doing this as some kind of law school project?

I keep seeing you guys refer to "unformated" versus "formated" capacities, as if a 500 Gigabyte hard drive that you buy from any retailer has 35 Gigabytes of software written to it when you format it, leaving you with only 465 Gigabytes of free space that is reported as it's "formated capacity." Your information is incorrect, there is information that is written to the drives that do take up space, however the amount of space taken up is realtively small, and normally only a few 10's of Megabytes of space are unusable after the drive is formated, not Gigabytes of space, and the formating on a flash drive takes up even less space (hard drives have tracks that become unsable due to the formating technique used). Depending on the file volumes being created, various overhead can be accumulated, unix typically has a dedicated virtual memory partition that is dynamic in other operating systems that can also contribute to smaller than expected partion sizes for usable memory. However, the main issue with a 500 GB hard drive and only haveing 465 GB of space available to use on it has more to do with marketing than with formating. In SI prefixes giga means 1,000,000,000. In computer operating systems giga means 1,073,741,824. When a company sells a device with 500,000,000,000 bytes capacity, they can use the SI prefix to advertise it legally as 500 gigabytes, even though it's capacity in regards to computer software is 465.66 gigabytes.

Take a look at the box for a seagate hard drive and you will see that they have a disclaimer saying that they call a gigabyte 1,000,000,000 bytes.