Apple, others, sued over hard-drive size claims

gobble gobblegobble gobble
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2015
I for one support the suit. If your hard drive is really 56 Gb instead of 60 Gb, you should say so. 4 Gb (or whatever) is more than a rounding error.



See http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030918/tech_...rs_suit_1.html





p.s. I don't really go in for the restitution bit, just want to see truth in advertising.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 83
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    It's not a rounding error. It's semantics, and the suit is without ANY merit. Guess what? A real GigaByte is one-billion and not 1073741824 Bytes.



    60 GigaBytes is sixty-billion Bytes.



    So what if a computer really reports GiBiBytes, of which there are 55.87935...



    From the article:

    Quote:

    For example, when a consumer buys what he thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140 gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.



    That is a flat-out lie. He is getting exactly what is advertised. A 150 GigaByte HDD.
  • Reply 2 of 83
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    I am not sure about others but I know apple does this and I thought I see others give a disclaimer. From Apple's websites...



    Quote:

    *For hard drive capacity measurements, 1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.



    They have no right to sue and will lose.
  • Reply 3 of 83
    placeboplacebo Posts: 5,767member
    Well, my 160 GB drive on my G5 is actually 151 GB capacity, but you know what? I really don't care.
  • Reply 4 of 83
    thunderpoitthunderpoit Posts: 709member
    well i for one am outraged that hard disk drives are advertised in decimal and then the computer goes and formats it in binary! doing so completely makes several gigs of my hard drive innacessable to me and i as the consumer want my money back!









    further proof that some people should NEVER be allowed near computers. Do these people wonder why computer manufacturers dont include better cupholders on their computers as well?
  • Reply 5 of 83
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    LAMO...



    Apple legal must be having a easy week.
  • Reply 6 of 83
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Placebo

    Well, my 160 GB drive on my G5 is actually 151 GB capacity, but you know what? I really don't care.



    No, 160 and 151 are the same number. You've left out the variables (units of measurement). This is precisely the error the others have made.
  • Reply 7 of 83
    not unlike myselfnot unlike myself Posts: 2,037member
    What rubbish.... "My hard drive is bigger then your hard drive".



    "It's not the size of the drive, it's the length of it's write arm. "
  • Reply 8 of 83
    the generalthe general Posts: 649member
    Actually, many drives and stuff I read on drives and pc boxes have stated stuff like 120GB(unformatted). IE: when you format it, you will have less space, and different formats also give different results.
  • Reply 9 of 83
    jukebox herojukebox hero Posts: 440member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by The General

    Actually, many drives and stuff I read on drives and pc boxes have stated stuff like 120GB(unformatted). IE: when you format it, you will have less space, and different formats also give different results.



    Yeah, here's the thing... those crazy OS writers make the assumption that we want the computer to keep track of our files in a directory table. Thats stupid. I would much prefer to write them down on a piece of paper and refer to them by head and cylinder. That way I would always know where every byte was -- the way real programmers do!
  • Reply 10 of 83
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    It's got nothing to do with the formatting of the drive and everything to do with what Eugene said. A kilobyte can be defined in 2 ways: 1000 bytes or 1024 bytes. Both terms are entirely accurate, though ambiguous. A kilo, in metric terms, means 1000 of something. 1000 meters is a kilometer. A kilo, in computer terms, means 1024 bytes. Companies advertise their sizes using metric terms and that's where the difference comes in. It adds up when you deal with large amounts. A "mega" means 1000 "kilo" in metric terms. In computer terms, it means 1024 kilo, which when you consider it with the fact that a kilo in computer terms (1024), you get some considerable difference.



    The lawsuit will result in nothing because there is truth in the advertising. It's just an ambiguous truth.
  • Reply 11 of 83
    jante99jante99 Posts: 539member
    It's not a scam, it's marketing.
  • Reply 12 of 83
    thuh freakthuh freak Posts: 2,664member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by torifile

    It's got nothing to do with the formatting of the drive and everything to do with what Eugene said.



    well, there is also some inaccessible portions of a hard disk, even after the difference between the metric and computer versions of Kilo, Mega, Giga (..). The file system (HFS, HFS+, fat32, ext2, ..) takes up a little piece of the hard drive too. also, when u format your hard disk (in Disk Utility), the program actually steals a few megs in separate invisible partitions for drivers and sometimes a bootstrap partition. if you use the command line utility 'pdisk' you can see these invisible partitions (NOTE: Be careful with pdisk, it can erase hard drives).
  • Reply 13 of 83
    apple legalapple legal Posts: 4member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by \\/\\/ickes

    LAMO...



    Apple legal must be having a easy week.



    8)
  • Reply 14 of 83
    murbotmurbot Posts: 5,262member
    Let me share my signature with everyone, you bastard!!



  • Reply 15 of 83
    nofeernofeer Posts: 2,427member
    two things\\



    first--60 gb is 60gb, they never say 60gb of storage, its only a size, like my size 10 nike, and my size 10.5 reaboks



    second--this is only to generate $$$$$ for attorneys very little to the "victims" classic class action lawsuit againts blockbuster, i get a $3.50 coupon and the attorneys got 112 million dollars, it's a scam, most class actions suits are abused for attorney money generation very little help to consumers.



    when i buy a HD at 60gb thats what i get no foul here.
  • Reply 16 of 83
    not unlike myselfnot unlike myself Posts: 2,037member
    Can we sue the people for suing? I want a class action suit against idiots. What's my share?
  • Reply 17 of 83
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    I'd like to see some way of getting computers and spec sheets to calculate a GB the same way: either have the computer consider 1000 bytes a kB or have the spec sheets consider 1024 bytes a kB. I would rather have the industry players do something along the lines of CRT monitor specs, e.g., 17" screen/ 16" viewable. But of course, the only reason we have that clarification is because someone sued over the same sort of thing.
  • Reply 18 of 83
    macusersmacusers Posts: 840member
    I bought a 120GB LaCie hard drive and it was only 112GB... but I dont care... I know that Apple has"

    1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less." writen everywhere.
  • Reply 19 of 83
    wrong robotwrong robot Posts: 3,907member
    Well how about this for a claim, apple claims you can store 10,000 songs(all at 160 kbps compression) on it's unformatted 40 GB iPod, when formatted though, that number is likely to decrease to 9,000 something.



    nyuck nyuck nyuck.
  • Reply 20 of 83
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    OK, I take a simpler approach. I don't remember this happening before with my other drives. If I buy a drive that says 250GB, I expect the drive to show up as 250GB minus a few hundred MB of formatting. (Not 10GB!) If the unformatted drive shows up as less than 250GB drive, the specs on the box are misleading and need to be changed. My brother just bought a 250GB drive and I was racking my brain trying to find out where the extra memory went. I think I understand now, but I spent HOURS trying to reformat to get the extra space.



    It really needs to be changed back.
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