So I bought an 8 gig iPod touch. I got it home and discovered it is actually a 6.83 gig iPod touch. OK, so the operating system takes some memory, although 1.17 gigs for an iPod OS seems excessive, but whatever. Yesterday it told me I needed to download OS 4.0.2, which fixes a security issue caused by reading malicious pdf files. So I download it, and discover it is well over 300 megabytes. For a security patch to keep me from reading malicious pdfs. I haven’t installed it on my iPod yet. When I do, am I going to have a 6.5 gig iPod touch? How can it possibly require 300 effing megabytes to keep me from reading malicious pdfs?
I know that software engineers are cavalier about memory now, with the surfeit of storage available on PCs, but come on, at this rate by the time I get to OS 4.1 I won’t have any space left for music.
(Whatever you do, don’t mention this to my dad. He’ll get on a tangent about how when he was programming he only had 4k of RAM and he had to know exactly what bit was in every single slot of his core memory.)
The update is the entire OS, with the fix already applied. When you update the iPod it will delete the older copy of the OS and install the new one from scratch.
The size of the iPod itself is measured (in the marketing) as 1GB = 1 billion bytes, when it really isn’t. In actual computing 1 kb is not 1000 bytes, it’s 1024 bytes. So, with that discrepancy, and with formatting overhead and a 300mb OS, your actual capacity will be less than the advertised 8GB.
I suspect that at least part of this comes from the capacity being stated in GB (gigabytes), that is, 8x10^9 bytes, whereas the capacity you are seeing is being presented in GiB (gibibytes) that is, 8x2^30 bytes, where the latter is equivalent to approximately 0.93*8GB. That brings you to about 7.44 GiB. Formatting requires some space for file tables, which normally loses about a percent or so. I suspect the rest is taken up by the operating system which is, I’m quite sure, terribly bloated. Google ‘ipod touch 6.83’ and you’ll see other people complaining about same.
Are people not getting the GB 10^9B thing the wrong way around.
Solid state memory, unlike hard disk memory is always made of chips whose size is some power of two (actually, almost always four, but the chips can be combined in various ways).
So an 8GB chip would actually contain 8,589,934,592 bytes. That should mean that there is plenty of space for overheads.
If you are only getting 6.83GB then the OS must be disgustingly bloated.
That means that it’s using over one GB. Yet you can get the whole of Windows 7 in 1GB and still have plenty of space to run apps.
You could run XP in 256GB and still run a decent music player!
Why does Apple do this? It is very frustrating. Windows doesn’t make you download and install the entire OS whenever there is a security patch. Apple does that with iTunes too. Every update you have to reload the whole thing. Then I have to replace the quick launch button and the copy in the startup folder because they stop working. Not to mention the wasted time downloading and reinstalling. Why can’t they just patch it?
Not too familiar with standing up for Apple, but I suspect that the only reason Windows doesn’t do this is because the patches affect so many components that can be configured in so many different ways that it’s impractical. (It may well be that it does send down altered components as fully compiled and linked units.)
Obviously doing a clean compile and link is a much less dangerous option than sending out dozens of patches. The problem in Apple’s case seems to be that the OS for the ipod is so ridiculously bloated that they are actually sending out one piece of software that is many times larger than the entire W7 memory image!
The usage of the word “gigabyte” depends on context. Usually when discussing in terms of storage space it’s 10^9 (or 1000^3), i.e. one billion bytes. But occasionally, it has an associated binary prefix, such as when you’re talking about RAM - or 1024^3, a “gibibyte.” In short, this means that a gigabyte of storage is less than a gigabyte of RAM. Marketing and labeling executives don’t appreciate the cumulative difference and often use GB when most people think GB=GiB.
Further complicating things, even Windows messes this up. My harddrive, for instance, is referred to as “279 GB or 299 961 937 920 bytes”. 279GB is 279 000 000 000 bytes - it should say “279 GiB or 299 961 937 920 bytes.” Which means that Windows counts in GiB, but displays as GB; putting an 8GB HDD in there would display as 7.45GB (but really meaning 7.45 GiB). I don’t have an OS X machine to test on, but I imagine they’re making the same mistake.
So, in short, the OS takes only 0.62GiB of space. The rest of the difference is made up in the conversion to GiB, which is what your machine displays as GB.
Yes. I know that the disk space taken by W7 is enormous.
However, for devices such as an ipod the OS, as it is stored on the ‘disk’ is usually an image, as opposed to a vast proliferation of files.
The point I was making was that if you took an image of, say, Windows XP running a well featured media player you could easily do it in 256MG (i.e. a hibernation file would be smaller than that) and that would be a fully featured multi-tasking OS.
Yet Apple seem to be taking over five times this amount of space just for a media player and the OS functions required to support it.
It require enormous incompetence on the part of Apple to use that much space just for a music player when the whole of Windows (or Linux) can do so much more in a small fraction of the space.
The main problem seems to be that when anyone is selling you something they use the smaller definition of ‘giga’ whereas when Windows or Linux reports space taken or required they use the larger.
There is a very good reason why an OS uses the ‘power of two’ definition. The reason sellers use it is simply to make it look as if you are getting more than you actually are.
I remember the old days. The first computer I programmed for had 48K of memory (and it supported four concurrent users). The Mac OS use to fit on a 400K floppy, and MS-DOS could load in 8K of memory.
And, of course, we had a few computers with those 5 Mb, 50 pound Winchester hard drives, and those 5Mb disk platters that would occasionally disintegrate when they rotated too fast.
I remember upgrading my Mac to 4Mb of memory and wanted to know what I would do with all that memory.
The bigger the disk/memory, the faster we fill it up.
The difference between 4.0.1 and 4.0.2? The “security flaw” is the thing that lets you “jailbreak” your iPod Touch and install non-Apple-approved software. Really fun and useful stuff like Google Voice Mobile.
Apple used to make the same mistake, but they changed it for the desktop OS in the most recent version (Macintosh OS X 10.6 aka Snow Leopard). However they still use the “wrong” method for iOS. How Mac OS X and iOS report storage capacity (support.apple.com)
Very much worth installing. The “security flaw” is indeed a genuine security flaw, that the jailbreak authors exploited in order to allow you to install non-Apple-approved software, but which could just as easily be exploited by someone else in order to do something more malicious.
I’m baffled at how much mischief anyone could get up to by exploiting an iPhone or (in my case) an iPod Touch. No, it’s a worthwhile trade-off, especially after you Jailbreak it then change the password to the administrator account.