Among the many under the hood improvements included in the latest OSX version (10.6 – Snow Leopard, for those who've been under a rock the last few months), there's an unexpected and unpleasant (at least for me) surprise: now Finder uses base 10 to calculate disk and file sizes, instead of the base 2 de facto standard.

Apparently, the motive behind this is to avoid the consumers feeling cheated when they buy an allegedly 1TB hard drive and find out it really is a 953GB 931GB drive. Meanwhile, the RAM size is still reported according to the supposedly old and deprecated base 2 representation. I love consistency.

This all stems from one very simple fact: hard drive manufacturers have been maliciously marketing their hard drives' capacities in base 10 since the 90's, since it's more profitable to sell a 100 × 10⁹ byte hard drive as a 100GB drive instead of a 100 × 2³⁰ byte drive, since the latter would be more expensive to manufacture.

It wasn't always like this, hard drives from respectable manufacturers used to have the announced capacity, but someone saw an opportunity to profit more by selling less and took it. The other manufacturers had to do the same in order to remain competitive.

Since Apple yielded to the IEC standard (base 10), we're bound to find many inconsistencies in the reported size of files and disks across operating systems, leading to more confusion. Notice the change is only in Finder, none of the other applications do this. We should be able to choose the preferred representation.

Thank you, Apple, nice job breaking it.