16 GB Capacity says 14 GB?

Richard Wessels wrote:
This is not flaw and many will tell you it is because of the space needed for the OS or that formatting takes up the space, but they are all wrong.

Many years ago, the HDD manufacturers got together and decided to start screwing their customers. They changed the meaning of a gigabyte from what it should be (1,073,741,824 bytes) to simply 1 billion bytes. This is a cheat and a great way for storage manufactures to cheat their customers. In the beginning only a few caught on and there was a lawsuit filed, but the storage makers only got their hands slapped and where told they could continue this heinous practice as long as they disclosed it on the packaging. Well they do, just in very small text.

The over all effect of this change was not all that great when hard drives where only 1-2 gigabytes in size. However, now I have a 1 TB (yeah right) external HDD sitting next to me. The actual size of which is far less. It is more like 940 gigabytes.

What is worse is that now Apple is playing along and making the OS read the HDD as that size even though the byte count does not bear that out. It is despicable and shameful that we as consumers have let these companies do this to us and get away with it. It is even more shameful that we make excuses for it and do not really understand the systems we use on a daily basis well enough to know when we are getting screwed.

My iPhone 3GS at (supposed) 32GB is actually only 29.3 GB and I am not even certain I can trust the iOS to actually show me the real amount of capacity either. Considering that Apple changed Snow Leopard to go along with this fleecing of it's customers.

Message was edited by: Richard Wessels

Message was edited by: Richard Wessels

so was this the original tester phone's? and are the newer "16gb" i phone 4's capatible to handle all 16gb?

( in response to "This is normal - the "missing" two gigs is accounted for by the iOS and other such features that are absolutely necessary for your phone to work." by lifelovejobCHANGES)

so was this the original tester phone's? and are the newer "16gb" i phone 4's capatible to handle all 16gb?

supagdub wrote:

so was this the original tester phone's? and are the newer "16gb" i phone 4's capatible to handle all 16gb?

Just a thought, but instead of posting silly questions, try reading the thread you replied to. The question you asked has already been answered in the thread.

There are no "new" iPhone 4's.... the "new" one's are exactly the same as the one's sold on release day with the exception of the version of iOS on the device.

I was always told that there is no question that is a silly question, however considering the fact that there are over 30 thread's to this post, no I didn't have the time to read over all of them that is why I posed the question in the first place... but thank you for clearing that up again...

not clear in advertising!

16gb is 16gb. when you buy 12 beer in a case you get 12 beer.

the fact that ios is taking 2gb is irrelevant. a good product vendor would have the ios storage separate from the ios data storage.

simple fact is you never get what you pay for when advertised. apple is not the only one doing this. still think iphone 4 is a marvel of engineering.

😁

I think that it is OK for normal operators of computers to see 32 GB meaning 32 billion bytes. Unless you are at a machine code level, you really don't need to know that 64GB is really 0x1000000000 in hexadecimal. Steven Jobs wanted to insulate people including himself from in inner workings of the computer. Also, let us not allow 31,800,000,000 bytes to mean 32GB; because, then, it is not the matter of a definition, it becomes a simple lie.

Excellent! i really like your answer full marks, i did not know it, but is there any forum for poor customers also in this world?

This 2 gigabytes is used for the factory apps and other factory settings ec.!

The word capacity has has always meant capacity. Going back over 30 years plus of programming. The capacity has always meant the capacity for the device. The capacity of a a hard drive is the total capacity before any formatting or any other kind of overhead. The capacity of the hard drive in my apple iMac is

"Capacity: 2 TB (2,000,398,934,016 bytes)" listed under system profiler. The Apple operating system occupies part of this space. Apple still reports the Capacity of the Hardware as

"Capacity: 2 TB (2,000,398,934,016 bytes)" (actually 1.8TB) this never changes regardless of any change to the apps or Operating system. Now maybe Apple uses the term capacity in the exact same context with a different definition on an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4s, but I doubt it.

Yeah that sounds great. But once you start using separate drives for different parts of the OS and OS Data then you sacrifice speed and can cause more problems. What could work is a 16GB partion on a 18GB drive that lets you have the full 16GB of storage for data and say an extra 2GB for the OS and other system files but still is on one drive so you dont lose speed.

This is the real reason as was pointed out earlier in the thread. It's not because the OS takes up space or the way the drive is formatted.

Every OS in the world does this, Windows, older versions of OSX and all phones. Even my 64GB iPhone has 57.4 GB of space on it. It's just the way the OS and HD manufacturers actually report the space as it says on the packaging of any hard drive.

When you format any memory device it has to 1:create the file system. 2: save a little extra just in case a bad specter comes up and 3: store the basic hardware drivers, just enough to start the device.