8 thoughts on “iTunes Is Bad at Math, Part 2

  1. I’ve seen this as well, and another bug/glitch besides. Sometimes (OK, pretty much always) it will suddenly show me that I have 20+gb free on my 32gb iPad mini. That is to say, the bar will suddenly shrink as if I’ve deleted 15gb of stuff from the iPad. It used to be it would only do this for books, after the Enforced Segregation of eBooks that is iBooks (boo, hiss), but starting with iTunes 12 it does this for other things as well. I’ve never understood it. It happens occasionally with my iPhone (4s), but only rarely. Has anyone else run into this, and if so, have you any suggestions for dealing with this? It’s done this with two different iPads (my original iPad 4 and my newer iPad mini 2) and multiple versions of iTunes and the OS. It’s a mere visual glitch, but it’s an aggravation nonetheless and a bug I’d love to see squashed.

  2. I’ve seen this as well, and another bug/glitch besides. Sometimes (OK, pretty much always) it will suddenly show me that I have 20+gb free on my 32gb iPad mini. That is to say, the bar will suddenly shrink as if I’ve deleted 15gb of stuff from the iPad. It used to be it would only do this for books, after the Enforced Segregation of eBooks that is iBooks (boo, hiss), but starting with iTunes 12 it does this for other things as well. I’ve never understood it. It happens occasionally with my iPhone (4s), but only rarely. Has anyone else run into this, and if so, have you any suggestions for dealing with this? It’s done this with two different iPads (my original iPad 4 and my newer iPad mini 2) and multiple versions of iTunes and the OS. It’s a mere visual glitch, but it’s an aggravation nonetheless and a bug I’d love to see squashed.

    • Yes, but that doesn’t account for the difference I’m seeing. And I don’t think it should measure file size differently; there’s no logical reason for this, other than to sell iOS devices and claim they have more capacity than they do. It just confuses users when they see the size of a file in iTunes, and can’t sync it to their iOS device.

    • Yes, but that doesn’t account for the difference I’m seeing. And I don’t think it should measure file size differently; there’s no logical reason for this, other than to sell iOS devices and claim they have more capacity than they do. It just confuses users when they see the size of a file in iTunes, and can’t sync it to their iOS device.

  3. Several years ago, Apple gave in to the marketing people at companies that sell storage devices (mostly hard drives at the time) and decided to show file sizes in OS X as Base-10 instead of in Binary as it had before (and as the rest of the world does).

    Hard Drive manufacturers started using Base-10 because 1 Kilobyte in Base-10 is 1000 bytes, instead of 1024 bytes in Binary. Bytes have always been measured in binary, because computers were, and still are, binary devices… They are NOT decimal based devices.

    As Kilobytes move to Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, etc. The size difference of the binary measurements get exponentially larger than using decimals. The hard drive manufacturers saw this as a way to sell smaller amounts of storage for a higher price, while claiming it to be the same measurements as before.

    People would buy a 20 Gigabyte hard drive, connect it to their Mac, and find out that they had much less storage than was advertised.

    Apple gave in to this cheat, and several years ago they changed OS X’s calculation of file sizes from binary to decimal.

    The problem is that most of the rest of the world is still using binary. So if you download a 1.0 Gigabyte file on the Internet, when it arrives on your Mac, the file size will be shown (in decimal) as being even larger than the actual binary size.

  4. Several years ago, Apple gave in to the marketing people at companies that sell storage devices (mostly hard drives at the time) and decided to show file sizes in OS X as Base-10 instead of in Binary as it had before (and as the rest of the world does).

    Hard Drive manufacturers started using Base-10 because 1 Kilobyte in Base-10 is 1000 bytes, instead of 1024 bytes in Binary. Bytes have always been measured in binary, because computers were, and still are, binary devices… They are NOT decimal based devices.

    As Kilobytes move to Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, etc. The size difference of the binary measurements get exponentially larger than using decimals. The hard drive manufacturers saw this as a way to sell smaller amounts of storage for a higher price, while claiming it to be the same measurements as before.

    People would buy a 20 Gigabyte hard drive, connect it to their Mac, and find out that they had much less storage than was advertised.

    Apple gave in to this cheat, and several years ago they changed OS X’s calculation of file sizes from binary to decimal.

    The problem is that most of the rest of the world is still using binary. So if you download a 1.0 Gigabyte file on the Internet, when it arrives on your Mac, the file size will be shown (in decimal) as being even larger than the actual binary size.

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