That computers function in binary matters not one bit. In fact, the “binary argument” is fundamentally flawed, for several reasons:

1) Computers function in plenty of ways that shouldn’t be displayed to the vast majority of users: they fetch HTML/CSS but show a rendered web page; they read a pattern of real numbers yet play music; they calculate “2+2″ as 100, but answer “4″. Arguing for a particular display style, targeted at humans, because it more closely reflects the way the computer works is nonsensical. Computers are supposed to make things easier for people, not the other way around. Part of that should be displaying numbers that people really understand;

2) The international standard prefixes k, M, G, etc. are all defined as part of the decimal system, as the update to the ZDNet article so wonderfully points out. So 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 GB, 2^30 bytes = 1 GiB. Apple is just being consistent with international standards, which is a good thing;

3) The set of digits before the prefix is a decimal number. The units prefix, as a multiplier to that number, should match. (Reading about the Mars Climate Orbiter will, by analogy, tell you why mixing systems is bad.) If the number were displayed in base-2 form as well, I wouldn’t imagine there’d be many complaints about a switch to something more human-friendly;

4) Regardless of how many slices you cut them into, a thousand pizzas is still a thousand pizzas. No one is seriously going to refer to them as 4.63 kilopizzas (1000/(6*6*6)) if they happen to be cut into six slices. So why call 500 billion bytes “465.7 gigabytes” just because of the way computers work internally?; and besides

5) Bytes aren’t binary; bits are.

I think this is a huge improvement. If it causes confusion in the short term, it’s not the fault of Apple now or hard drive manufacturers, but by all those who should have switched years ago, when computers first started to be used by people other than ubergeeks. If everyone else follows suit, this’ll be a non-issue.

PLEASE just sell me a 931.322GB hard drive. Don’t call it a 1TB.

http://mlaman.wordpress.com/

Before:
Capacity – 185.99
Used – 91.37
Available – 94.62

After:
Capacity – 199.71
Used – 93.54
Available – 106.17

So even though I ‘have’ 12GB more space, the accounting change was nearly 15GB and my ‘used’ space increased by 2.2GB.

I assumed from Apple that maybe the operating system was 7GB more efficient. Maybe not…

But Apple giving into the manufacturer way is not only annoying to those who understand the 1000/1024 distinction, but it comes at the worst possible time. With solid state drives becoming popular, we are finally actually going to be listing the real capacity of drives. A 256 GB SSD is now going to be shown in OS X as having more than 256 GB.

Apple made the wrong decision here.