Apple supporting WDL initiative; Mac worldwide share; iPod suit
Apple is amongst a handful of tech companies pitching their support to a multinational effort to create a free international digital world library. Meanwhile, Piper Jaffray weighs in with estimates on the Mac platform's worldwide market share growth. And Apple has been hit with another lawsuit -- this time over iPod storage capacity.
Apple aiding World Digital Library effort
Reporters in Paris got a peek Wednesday at a prototype for the World Digital Library -- an online initiative by the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.N. cultural body UNESCO and other international partner libraries, which has also garnered the support of tech heavyweights Apple, Intel, and Google.
"Listen to a former American slave tell his story. Turn the pages of a book about ancient treasures from Egypt," reads a description of the concept by the Associated Press. "Pore over old maps written in Latin."
Modeled after the Library of Congress' American Memory project, the international digital library will be free and multilingual, with contributions from around the world, including rare books, films, prints, sound recordings and musical scores.
Google has pitched $3 million into the initiative while Apple and Intel are also taking supportive roles. Representatives for Intel were on hand at UNESCO's Paris headquarters Wednesday to show how the prototype worked on its child-focused Classmate PC, and Apple employees brought along mobile devices for demonstrations.
"We have provided (the project with) expertise about how to digitize documents, how to do it for less money, how to handle and sort digital content and make it accessible," said Herve Marchet, Apple's director of education markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Aimed for a 2008 launch, the digital library's five other partner institutions are Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the National Library of Egypt, the National Library of Brazil, the National Library of Russia and the Russian State Library.
Mac's worldwide market share estimates
With market research firms Gartner and IDC releasing somewhat uneven third-quarter U.S. market share estimates for Apple's Mac platform on Wednesday, investment bank Piper Jaffray has turn its attention towards quantifying the company's worldwide share gains.
Using IDC's preliminary release of worldwide PC unit sales in the September quarter -- which did not list Apple because of its marginal share -- analyst Gene Munster in a research note Thursday said he believes the Cupertino-based company's Mac platform achieved market share growth between 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent quarter-over-quarter.
"Specifically, IDC estimates that 66.85 million PCs were shipped worldwide in the September quarter. We believe Apple will report Mac unit sales of 2.1 million to 2.2 million for the September quarter," he explained. "At 2.1 million units, Mac market share would be 3.1 percent and at 2.2 million units Mac market share would be 3.3 percent."
Apple's Mac market share in the June quarter was 3.0 percent, up from 2.5 percent in the March quarter. IDC data for total worldwide PC shipments will be slightly revised within the next several weeks as final data is reported, but likely will not see a material enough change to alter September Mac market share percentages, the analyst added.
Apple sued over iPod storage capacity claims
Meanwhile, Montreal law student David Bitton is peeved at Apple for what he claims is misleading marketing. When he found that his new iPod nano came out-of-the-box with only 7.45 GB of available capacity rather than the 8 GB advertised, he sued.
According to the Montreal Gazette, the complaint filed Wednesday in Quebec Superior Court alleges that all Apple products have on average 7.5 percent less storage than advertised. So Bitton is asking for a full refund for himself and all iPod owners in Quebec.
Apple aiding World Digital Library effort
Reporters in Paris got a peek Wednesday at a prototype for the World Digital Library -- an online initiative by the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.N. cultural body UNESCO and other international partner libraries, which has also garnered the support of tech heavyweights Apple, Intel, and Google.
"Listen to a former American slave tell his story. Turn the pages of a book about ancient treasures from Egypt," reads a description of the concept by the Associated Press. "Pore over old maps written in Latin."
Modeled after the Library of Congress' American Memory project, the international digital library will be free and multilingual, with contributions from around the world, including rare books, films, prints, sound recordings and musical scores.
Google has pitched $3 million into the initiative while Apple and Intel are also taking supportive roles. Representatives for Intel were on hand at UNESCO's Paris headquarters Wednesday to show how the prototype worked on its child-focused Classmate PC, and Apple employees brought along mobile devices for demonstrations.
"We have provided (the project with) expertise about how to digitize documents, how to do it for less money, how to handle and sort digital content and make it accessible," said Herve Marchet, Apple's director of education markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Aimed for a 2008 launch, the digital library's five other partner institutions are Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the National Library of Egypt, the National Library of Brazil, the National Library of Russia and the Russian State Library.
Mac's worldwide market share estimates
With market research firms Gartner and IDC releasing somewhat uneven third-quarter U.S. market share estimates for Apple's Mac platform on Wednesday, investment bank Piper Jaffray has turn its attention towards quantifying the company's worldwide share gains.
Using IDC's preliminary release of worldwide PC unit sales in the September quarter -- which did not list Apple because of its marginal share -- analyst Gene Munster in a research note Thursday said he believes the Cupertino-based company's Mac platform achieved market share growth between 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent quarter-over-quarter.
"Specifically, IDC estimates that 66.85 million PCs were shipped worldwide in the September quarter. We believe Apple will report Mac unit sales of 2.1 million to 2.2 million for the September quarter," he explained. "At 2.1 million units, Mac market share would be 3.1 percent and at 2.2 million units Mac market share would be 3.3 percent."
Apple's Mac market share in the June quarter was 3.0 percent, up from 2.5 percent in the March quarter. IDC data for total worldwide PC shipments will be slightly revised within the next several weeks as final data is reported, but likely will not see a material enough change to alter September Mac market share percentages, the analyst added.
Apple sued over iPod storage capacity claims
Meanwhile, Montreal law student David Bitton is peeved at Apple for what he claims is misleading marketing. When he found that his new iPod nano came out-of-the-box with only 7.45 GB of available capacity rather than the 8 GB advertised, he sued.
According to the Montreal Gazette, the complaint filed Wednesday in Quebec Superior Court alleges that all Apple products have on average 7.5 percent less storage than advertised. So Bitton is asking for a full refund for himself and all iPod owners in Quebec.
Comments
So Bitton is asking for a full refund for himself and all iPod owners in Quebec.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
Good luck pal.
FSJ has responded through his lawyers and his reply: SIOOMA
My Seagate disk, 7% less.
The WD, 6.9%.
The Toshiba laptop (from work, I didn't buy it, I swear!), 7% less.
That's not including the OS on any of them. I guess I'll be busy preparing lawsuits for the next few years.
Montreal law student David Bitton is peeved at Apple for what he claims is misleading marketing. When he found that his new iPod nano came out-of-the-box with only 7.45 GB of available capacity rather than the 8 GB advertised, he sued.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
Law student sues. Surprise, surprise. Shouldn't he be doing something more important like studying insteading of stupid lawsuits?
From Apple's website;
"1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less"
I would be pretty scared if I found out a guy this dumb was representining me in court.
You know what would really help? Is if Apple and Microsoft actually used in their OSes the de-facto binary prefixes as defined in IEEE 1541-2002.
My Maxtor disk has 6.85% less available space than advertised.
My Seagate disk, 7% less.
The WD, 6.9%.
The Toshiba laptop (from work, I didn't buy it, I swear!), 7% less.
No, they don't. They have exactly the storage they are advertised to have. It's just that when your OS says that it has x GB available, it is wrong. It should say it has x GiB available. A GB does not equal a GiB, and that is where most of the discrepancy comes from, not from "formatting".
Meanwhile, Montreal law student David Bitton is peeved at Apple for what he claims is misleading marketing. When he found that his new iPod nano came out-of-the-box with only 7.45 GB of available capacity rather than the 8 GB advertised, he sued.
What a wanktard.
Any normal person, if they really did feel let down that they don't get the full 8GB of storage would just take the iPod back for a refund. But no, this little upstart, being a legal student wants to go out and get what he can, perhaps even try and make himself look good (or feel better for not getting laid in collage like everyone else). In fact, he probably bought it purposely seeing as nobody has been low enough to try and sue for such a retarded reason. I hope he gets raped by Apple Legal!
Oh jeez, not another one of those "advertised storage space doesn't equal actual storage space" lawsuits.
You know what would really help? Is if Apple and Microsoft actually used in their OSes the de-facto binary prefixes as defined in IEEE 1541-2002.
No, they don't. They have exactly the storage they are advertised to have. It's just that when your OS says that it has x GB available, it is wrong. It should say it has x GiB available. A GB does not equal a GiB, and that is where most of the discrepancy comes from, not from "formatting".
No. The advertised capacity is on a non-formatted drive. When the drive is formatted in compliance with ISO standards then depending on any bad sectors of the drive during stamping it will produce a varying amount of actual byte space available.
1024 bytes per kilobyte compounded up to megabytes, to gigabytes then terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, etc., is a different binary file size nomenclature.
End result: This is a lawyer needs more of a science background before he passes the bar.
Historically, memory (RAM) has always mis-used the metric prefixes. Kilo (k) means 10^3 (ie, 1000), and that's the way storage capacity has always been measured. But for RAM, kilo means 1024, because they were too lazy to come up with their own prefix and noticed that 1024 is "close" to 1000. But bump that up a couple of orders of magnitude, and it's no longer close.
G(storage) = 10^9 = 1000^3 = 1,000,000,000
G(RAM) = 1024^3 = 1,073,741,824
And there you have it, you "missing" 7.37%!
Oh jeez, not another one of those "advertised storage space doesn't equal actual storage space" lawsuits.
You know what would really help? Is if Apple and Microsoft actually used in their OSes the de-facto binary prefixes as defined in IEEE 1541-2002.
No, they don't. They have exactly the storage they are advertised to have. It's just that when your OS says that it has x GB available, it is wrong. It should say it has x GiB available. A GB does not equal a GiB, and that is where most of the discrepancy comes from, not from "formatting".
Are you *seriously* suggesting that Apple start measuring the capacity of their drives by GiBs rather than GBs?
Didn't we already go through this a couple of years ago with hard drive space? Perhaps this law student, and his lawyers, should take a walk across campus to the engineering building, find a CompSci major, and ask them the difference between how storage capacity and memory are measured.
Historically, memory (RAM) has always mis-used the metric prefixes. Kilo (k) means 10^3 (ie, 1000), and that's the way storage capacity has always been measured. But for RAM, kilo means 1024, because they were too lazy to come up with their own prefix and noticed that 1024 is "close" to 1000. But bump that up a couple of orders of magnitude, and it's no longer close.
G(storage) = 10^9 = 1000^3 = 1,000,000,000
G(RAM) = 1024^3 = 1,073,741,824
And there you have it, you "missing" 7.37%!
In other words, HDD manufacturers uses BASE-10 for marketing while RAM and NAND use BASE-2. both are factual depending on how you look at it.
No. The advertised capacity is on a non-formatted drive. When the drive is formatted in compliance with ISO standards then depending on any bad sectors of the drive during stamping it will produce a varying amount of actual byte space available.
Maybe I mis-used the word "exactly", but I am correct in stating that the majority of the discrepancy comes from the fact that the HDD manufacturers use the GB prefix correctly, and the OS manufacturers (Apple and Microsoft) do not.
If a drive is 8 GB, it can store 8,000,000,000 bytes. This is equal to 7.45 GiB. Hey, look at that! That's what iTunes/Windows/OS X/whatever, is telling this guy is available on his iPod. Except it's telling him that it's 7.45 GB, which is wrong. It is 8 GB, or 7.45 GiB.
To one decimal place, this guy is getting exactly the advertised storage space.
No. The advertised capacity is on a non-formatted drive. When the drive is formatted in compliance with ISO standards then depending on any bad sectors of the drive during stamping it will produce a varying amount of actual byte space available.
1024 bytes per kilobyte compounded up to megabytes, to gigabytes then terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, etc., is a different binary file size nomenclature.
End result: This is a lawyer needs more of a science background before he passes the bar.
You are correct that formatting does reduce available capacity (bad sectors, space for the directory, etc), but it is a very, very minor lose. But in terms of absolute, unformatted capacity, most hard drives (not sure about flash memory) actually have slightly more than the stated amount. The missing memory this guy is suing about is entirely due to bad math and misconceptions on his part (as you alluded to in your 2nd paragraph).
Are you *seriously* suggesting that Apple start measuring the capacity of their drives by GiBs rather than GBs?
No, I am *seriously* suggesting that Apple quotes file sizes in GiB.
Or have a user-selectable preference to show GB (being 10^9) or GiB (being 2^30) numbers.
But the current situation of having GiB numbers and calling them GB is not, IMHO, acceptable.
Are you *seriously* suggesting that Apple start measuring the capacity of their drives by GiBs rather than GBs?
No, I think the suggestion is for them to measure drive capacity in GB, but to do their math correctly!
If a drive is 8 GB, it can store 8,000,000,000 bytes. This is equal to 7.45 GiB. Hey, look at that! That's what iTunes/Windows/OS X/whatever, is telling this guy is available on his iPod. Except it's telling him that it's 7.45 GB, which is wrong. It is 8 GB, or 7.45 GiB.
For anyone that doesn't understand or believe what Mr.H stated, just open up Disk Utility and see for yourself.