Confused on iCloud Storage Tiers

All published storage marketing-related numbers across computing are always base 10 kilo/mega/giga/tera units, and not the base 2 kibi/mebi/gibi/tebi units.

This choice for the simple reason that the base 10 displayed numbers are bigger for the same storage, and marketing always likes bigger-looking numbers.

Some operating system displays can and will use base 2 units, but that usage is less than ubiquitous, and is quite rare in modern marketing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

bk776 wrote:

Thanks! Any thoughts on reconciling that with this post? Makes me think they are actually using the binary standard, not decimal, for storage sizes…

Do I want to comment on a ~decade-old post involving Microsoft Windows? No thanks.

GB is base 10.

GiB is base 2.

If you buy GB and actually get GiB somewhere, you win.

Apple uses base 10: How storage capacity is measured on Apple devices - Apple Support

Want an official answer, ask the official people at Apple.

Yes.

(265231)

From the most convenient AI:

• Decimal vs. Binary:
  • GB represents a decimal measurement equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes (used for hard drives, flash storage, and marketing).
  • GiB (gibibyte) represents a binary measurement equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes (2³⁰ bytes), which is often used in computer memory (RAM) and operating systems.

As Apple is composed a alot of smart people, many of them lawyers, it seems unlikely to me that they would use GB if they meant GiB.

The terms GiB and TiB are used far less often and may themselves be confusing to people who don't go deep into the technical world.

There's a disclaimer at the bottom of the iMac specification page defining the storage capacity as a billion bytes, but no corresponding one for iCloud storage tiers in the Knowledge Base.

(265232)

Probably not. You can try reaching out to Apple support (Contact - Official Apple Support), but I seriously doubt you will get a satisfactory answer.

TB (teribyte) and GB (gigabyte) are the measures used by Apple and the majority of commercially sold computing devices currently. There can be some variance in the two measures, but even at the Terabyte/Tebibyte level it is rather small.

I know of no official documentation by Apple on this topic, but also no reason why they would need it. Both standards are documented and accepted.

Apple publicly uses TB and GB, but my question is whether that is actually the standard that they use for raw storage size regardless of how small the difference is. I.e., while they may advertise a plan as 200GB, is it actually 200GiB.

Thanks! Any thoughts on reconciling that with this post? Makes me think they are actually using the binary standard, not decimal, for storage sizes. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/6nxrfo/til_the_2_terabyte_icloud_storage_plan_is/

Thanks. Are there any public Apple documents to support this? How come on my iCloud manage storage I see 200GB and not 200 GiB?

Not sure its all that productive to get hung up on 9 year old Reddit posts.