Is Apple allowed to do this?

I hadn't heard about the viewable screen size thing at all. But i do accept that this an industry standard, however i was wondering whether Apple would "compensate" iPod users for supply a product which does not quite live up to its claim.

Yes i hate the compensation culture that we live in, but i'm prepared to give up my morals on the ground that i payed ?220 for my brand new 15 gig iPod during the summer and space is filling up fast!

The hard drive is rated as 10/20/40 gig etc. just like a computer's hard drive. That's the amount of space the manufacturer rates the drive at. It's physical space is roughly that, but once formatted, a hardrive loses space to the FAT(file allocation table). This is unavoidable and varies based on the file system the hard drive is formatted to.

Apple is not doing anything wrong and there is really no other way to market the device. Sure, you don't actually get 10 of hard driver space once formatted, but apple or any other electronic maker is not going to market their products otherwise.

Besides, it wouldn't make sense to market the iPod in actual usuable space i.e. 9.512 gig etc.

there is even a thread here that suggests that the 30/40 drives are actually the same drive but just formatted at dif sizes...now wouldn't that be reason to get upset if true!?

Originally posted by jiggles
there is even a thread here that suggests that the 30/40 drives are actually the same drive but just formatted at dif sizes...now wouldn't that be reason to get upset if true!?

I shouldn't think so.

Years ago (I'm showing my age again;) ) you could buy a device to punch a hole in a 720K 3.5" floppy to fool the PC into thinking it was a 1.44Mb and so double the capacity for the price of a (then cheaper) 720K disk. The belief was that the disk substrates were the same. This was of course nonsense and you took your life (or your data) in your hands if you used 'fiddled' disks to archive data.

The 30/40 question is more likely to do with the tolerances on the platters/read-write heads coming off the production line. Less tolerant and they get fitted with firmware limiting their capacity.

In theory you could put on firmware to allow a higher capacity, but then you're back in punched floppy disk territory.

And frankly, it's not worth the grief.

I just looked [somewhat quickly] on apple.com and they don't say that an iPod holds 10,20,40 gbs of music. They say it has a 10,20,40 gb hard drive which can hold up to 10,000 songs. Or four weeks of music.

Since none of the above claims are false, its not false advertising.

This is a perfectly normal and generally accepted way of measuring HD capacity in any device. If you buy a 10/20/40 gig HD for your PC it will be just the same, or likewise if you buy a PC with one that size.

And Apple do cover this on their specs page:
Storage 10GB (2) 20GB (2) 40GB (2)
(2) 1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.
http://www.apple.com/uk/ipod/specs.html

Edit: I don't agree with this practice, just saying it has always been the way with hard-drives in anything. Hopefully one day it will change and the manufacturers will quote real-world capacity.

I still contend that its not false advertising, even if they didn't have the 'actual formatted capacity less' note.

They don't advertise that a 20gb iPod holds 20gb of music. Now, you may have an issue with that, but its not false advertising.

And the 5gb iPod gets very close to 5gbs of music- like 4.8. I'll check tonight to see.

Originally posted by Optrix
This is just a question on something that occured to me. The size of the iPod in gigabytes is given on the apple site as being available as either 10/20/40. However i could see no mention of the fact that once the iPod is formatted and has the firmware installed that you will get less than the amount specified.

I have no particular problem with this, however it could be construed as false advertising since no 10 gig iPod actually ships with 10 gigs of memory for music, in the same way that no 20 or 40 do.

The only omission that Apple make on the web page selling the iPod is as follows:

"* USB 2.0 connection is for Windows PCs only; dock connector to USB 2.0 cable sold separately. "

Now i know that almost every PC and Mac user knows that a hard drive never has the full amount specified due to formatting, but Apple have not made any suggestion to the public (on their site) that will get anything less that the amount specified on the site/ box and iPod itself.

Are they right to do so, or could this be interpreted as false advertising.

Even if it is then they would have to make hard drives of unusual sizes i.e. mine a 15 gig iPod has 13.6 gig of useable memory, meaning that it would have to be a around the 17.4 - 18.4 gig mark to get a full 15 gigs.

The 'smaller' HDD size has nothing to do with the firmware or formatting, it is the way in which GBs are calculated - Computers calculate GBs as 1024MB, but we theoretically think of MBs as 1000MBs. There inlays the problem. If you had done any research (or knew anything about HDDs) this would not have been a surprise.

Originally posted by Optrix
ok here's some simple maths.

15 gigabytes x 1000 megabytes = 15,000 megabytes

15 gigabytes x 1024 megabytes = 15,360 megabytes


Trouble is your simple math is a bit too simple.
15 Giga x 1,000,000 bytes = 15,000,000 bytes
15 giga x 1024 mega x 1024 kila x 1 byte = 15,7286 bytes (the 1024 is not 1000) problem crops up with every 'thousand' (2**10)

If you take the 1024x1024 figure and divide into 15,000,000 you end up with 14.3 "base 2 gig" in size as the raw size of the drive. Then add in formatting/partition/driver overhead and you'll get to the 13.6 you see.

Regarding the screen size issue. Years ago, monitor manufacturers sold their products based on the physical size of the tube. So a 15 monitor had about 14" of viewable space since the very edges of a tube don't "light up." They got taken to court, which is now why you see monitors sizes described as 15" viewable.

Seems to me that since HD devices (like 3.5 or 2.5 in notebooks) get hooked up to computers which report size in base 2 gigs that the drive manufacturers should report the size in base 2 gigs also. It'd be like someone selling food by the stone (the English unit of weight.) Sure the sellers would be telling the truth, but nobody would know what they meant. Ditto with selling drives and memory devices, like USB flash drives and MP3 players like the iPod, in units of 100000000 bytes. Just don't seem right. I mean, could I see my 150GG* iPod and be truthful?

* 1 GG = 250000 bytes of storage ;)

Enough of this! We ARE getting the advertised amount of space.

15,000,000,000 bytes IS EQUAL to 13.96 GB.

Here's the math to prove it:

Hard Drive manufacturers rate 1 GB using the Decimal system:
1000 X 1000 X 1000 = 1,000,000,000

However, here's how "Data" rates 1 GB in the Binary world:
1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824

(This was exactly what zapod stated earlier)

So now let's multiply the decimal size of 1 billion bytes by 15 (for the 15GB Hard Drive size):

1,000,000,000 x 15 = 15,000,000,000

Now when you buy an iPod (or any Hard Drive) you are receiving the full advertised size. However, this is rated in decimal format as 15 billion bytes. However when when we check the capacity, a computer system will always report space in using the binary format so we need to convert this number.

So we take 15,000,000,000 and divide it by 1,073,741,824 to get the number that will be reported to us by a computer.

15,000,000,000 divided 1,073,741,824 = 13.96

So even though there are 15,000,000,000 bytes of capacity, the iPod will only report a capacity of 13.96 (well 13.8 of free space since the system uses up a bit of memory). So in the end, you aren't getting lied to by Apple, since you are getting a capacity of 15,000,000,000; However when this is translated to GB you only end up with 13.96GB.

To Verify this for yourself, simply open up the iPod in Disk mode and check the number of actual bytes it has. (Not the number of GB).

Simply put, just take the actual number of bytes of any Hard Drive and divide it by 1,073,741,824 to get the number of GB. (Try this with your own computer hard drive... you'll see that your own Hard Drive is being reported exactly in this manner: byte vs GB).

(Or for those who want the "super easy" method, simply multiply the "advertised" Hard Drive size by 0.93 to get the approximate Binary HD size; this will work for any Hard Drive, including the ones you would buy to upgrade your computer)

EDITED - For Clarity

hmmm... I'd better stop trying to pick up girls in bars quoting the size of my 'disk' in GBs... :)

'Carn guys, I think we can move on now...

I'm glad that someone started doing the math to show how this issue works.

The formatting of a drive contributes to the problem, but by far the largest contributor is the fact that drive manufacturers started quoting drive sizes in "billion bytes" instead of "2^30" for GB quite a while back. As drives get bigger, this factor just gets bigger and bigger.