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General discussion

Apple's defintely been busy: Check this

Oct 10, 2007 9:36AM PDT

Between the MagSafe adapter issue that I read over at the Yahoo Tech pages, the iMac problems, and the iPhone suits/hacking business, you'd think Apple has quite a bunch on their plates. Well, I was browsing the net looking again for a suitable case for my iPod Touch with no avail, but I found this:

http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/

Still says Pre-Order, even though it's out already. Probably a typo or hasn't been updated in the past few days. The Specs list up to 1750 songs on the 8Gb version but the 8GB Nano can have 2000. ... Apple needs to re-estimate their stuff it looks like. Now unless the iPod pages on the Apple site are just a mess, maybe the rumors I've seen all over the web that suggest new upgrades for the Touch, iPhone, and other products by the holidays and early Spring are somewhat true. Wouldn't be the first time.

But, this is just my crazy speculation. I'm probably wrong in this case. Site just needs an update I suppose.

Discussion is locked

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the OS
Oct 16, 2007 4:26AM PDT

I think this is primarily because the touch has a more extensive software installed on it, more features like youtube, safari, calendar, itunes store... whatever. and it uses up more space on the 8 gig ipod, so the actual available storage space for songs is less than on the ipod nano.

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Yes that's probably the answer as with most iPods
Oct 16, 2007 9:08AM PDT

the OS takes up some space. What's odd is I have two Nanos, and one registers as 3.7GB and the other reads as 3.2GB. They were bought within a week or two from each other, and the OS is exactly the same. I think that whichever brand drives that are used in them, each one is estimated to have 4GB or so, etc. They always round up...

Oh well, it's a common marketing technique nowadays. If they were smart, they'd install the system on a bigger drive so that you actually get the advertised storage. My laptop is 10GB short of what it was shown to have at the Apple Store.

... I just posted this thread to be informative since I thought the update was overdue. It's been fixed since then however. But yeah yashgta you're right.
-BMF

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That's a whole different story
Oct 16, 2007 9:58PM PDT

"My laptop is 10GB short of what it was shown to have at the Apple Store."

There is no "rounding up" going on here. Each drive is the size that is advertised.

The difference is size is in the way that the Manufacturers report the size, entirely accurately, and the way that the OS reports the size, again entirely accurately. HD sizes are calculated in bits using Binary math while the KB, MB, GB are all metric measures.

The easiest way to explain it, although not entirely accurate, is that the manufactures use 1000 as the number of K in a MB and the system uses 1028K.

So, although a metric "kilo" equals 1,000 (e.g. one kilogram = 1,000 grams), a binary "Kilo" equals 1,024 (e.g. one Kilobyte = 1,024 bytes).

This accounts for the so called "missing" GB on an HD.

Google it. There are pages of this stuff

P

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Interesting, I hadn't looked at that way.
Oct 17, 2007 7:50AM PDT

I knew that computers would call two 512MB RAM sticks as 1GB, even though they are actually 1024MB. In a way, it's pretty close, but like I said earlier, my laptop reports my 120GB HD as just about 110GB or so.

But that doesn't account for the iPod differences. If you have two identical iPod Nanos (save the color) and one registers to have more than the other but under 4GB, something isn't quite right. The OS is exactly the same. Even if the system counts 1028K or something like that to be 1GB, it doesn't add up. The difference between my Nanos is around half a GB. That's 500MB, or approx. 125 songs at 4MB average. For me, that's a bit of "missing" storage. This infers that some HDs for iPods (at least) are either from different manufacturers (think of the multiple touch screen vendors that sold the LCDs to Apple for the iPhone, etc.) or are rounded up.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in PVPs and other PMPs, it doesn't really make sense.
Thanks for the system tip though. Does clear up a few things.
-BMF

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Yep, he's right.
Oct 24, 2007 10:26PM PDT

My Winbox has a 40GB (actually 37GB) HD, my external is 160 GB (actually 153) etc.

It's the way it's all calculated.

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Yeah I Know, it just sucks that the machines
Oct 25, 2007 2:12PM PDT

don't read them as the intended size. I could really make a lot of use over the "lost" space, but apparently my computers don't agree with that LOL.
Well, might as well as make some use of it.
-BMF