After purchasing a 160Gb hard drive for my MacBook, I was slightly puzzled to find that it was only registering a total capacity of 150GB. Where has 10Gb gone? I wondered.

A call to Apple support (my first) and an answer… Apple can’t won’t count like the rest of us.

To be more technical, Apple uses binary mathematics to count the hard drive capacity and the manufactures use base 10 mathematics. Which means you appear to lose 10Gb but its still a 160Gb drive and you can still put 160Gb of data on it.

The phrase Think Different comes to mind. Or should it be Count Different!

Mac OS X Hard Drive Math [Apple.com]