Comments on: Apple legal clears its desk

By: Danno X, Chicago IL

Danno X, Chicago IL — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:23:16 +0000

obvi…

By: David, Dallas, TX

David, Dallas, TX — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:15:47 +0000

Not only does the above noted law student have no engineering background, but he also does not know how to read the fine print (this seems pretty ironic when considering his chosen profession). Quoted from the Apple Store, a standard disclaimer.

"(1) 1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less."

Apple has been making that sort of claim about their hard drives for years.

By: Steve, San Jose, CA

Steve, San Jose, CA — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:51:44 +0000

Obviously this law student has no engineering background. Normally I do not endorse Wikipedia, but in this case they have a very good explanation of the confusion. Looking up "gigabyte" one finds there are 2 definitions, one being 10E9 or 1,000,000,000 bytes and the other being 2E30 or 1,073,741,824 ("E" stands for exponent, i.e., raised to that power). Since computers are binary machines they "see" 2E30 as being 1 GB thus if a hard drive were advertised as 500 GB according to the 10E9 byte definition, the computer would read its capacity as 465 GB. Flash memory manufacturers (the iPod Nano uses flash) also use the 10E9 definition of a GB. Thus I see little merit in this suit.