Comment on Apple reveals M3 Ultra, taking Apple silicon to a new extreme
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 year agoThey’re not wrong. 1000 GB is a terabyte, so 512 GB is over half a terabyte.
It’s exactly half a tebibyte though.
That’s a retcon of hardware producers using measurement units confusion to advertise less as more.
It’s nice to have consistent units naming, but when the industry has existed for a long enough time with the old ones, seems intentional harm for profit.
How is it a retcon? The use of giga- as a prefix for 10^9^ has been in use as part of the metric system since 1960. I don’t think anyone in the fledgeling computer industry was talking about giga- or mega- anything at that time. The use of mega- as a prefix for 10^6^ has been in use since 1873, over 60 years before Claude Shannon even came up with the concept of a digital computer.
if anything, the use of mega- and giga- to mean 1024 is a retcon over previous usage.
That’s not a retcon. Manufacturers were super inconsistent with using it, so we standardized the terminology. For floppy disks were advertised as 1.44MB, but have an actual capacity of 1440 KiB, which is 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB.
The standardization goes back to 1999 when the IEC officially adopted and published that standard.
There was a federal lawsuit on the matter in California in 2020 that agreed with the IEC terminology.
All of this was taken from this Wikipedia article if you’d like to read more. Since we have common usage, standards going back almost 30 years, and a federal US lawsuit all confirming the terminology difference between binary and decimal units, it really doesn’t seem like a retcon.
OK, fine, all the world might say whatever it wants, but my units are powers of 2.
I prefer it too, but just because “gibibyte” is a stupid word doesn’t mean it’s fine to go against standards.
lengau@midwest.social 1 year ago
512 GiB is half a tebibyte. 512 GB is just under 477 GiB.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yup.
lengau@midwest.social 1 year ago
Correct. But that means 512 GB is not half a tebibyte.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Ah, correct. RAM used GiB, so I guess I implicitly made the switch.