this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

they could just show both bits and bytes

But what prefix? You could end up showing 4 units: Megabits, Mebibits, Megabytes and Mebibytes. Although there's also the JEDEC 100B.01, under which binary prefix is used with KB, MB, GB, TB, where the only clear difference is between kB and KB.
In that case, you get the insane 1TB = ~1.1TB or 1TB = ~0.9TB that you see on Windows.

My favorite example of unit confusion is the "1.44MB floppy", which is neither true in MB, nor MiB, because it's actually 1,440KiB, so it's either ~1.47MB or ~1.41MiB.