Is it normal for the 120 GB Macbook to come with 111 GB total, and approximately 90 GB with software?

Question

I was just wondering if this was the norm, since 9 GB of difference is really significant in my own opinion.

Answer 1

You've been caught between marketing people and technical people.

In the old days, a "megabyte" was 1,048,576 bytes. The marketing people thought that was too confusing, and soon a "MB" or "Megabyte" was 1,000,000 bytes.

This trend continued with Gigabytes... marketing types claim that a GB is 1,000 MB, or 1,000,000 KB, instead of 1,048,576 KB that the techs say that it is.

SOOOO... Your computer knows that your "120 GB hard drive" only 114 GB to begin with. I'm sure that hidden somewhere in your sales literature or in your owners manuals you'll see this disclaimer in tiny little writing.

Beyond that, you've got hidden partitions, sectors that couldn't be formatted, etc.

I don't know how much software and O/S files you've got on your machine, but yeah, the 90 GB is about right.


Next, we'll talk about how the old-style monitors has a 15" monitor that was smaller than some 14" monitors... and the lawsuits that followed.

Answer 2

Sounds O.K.

Because formatters/operating systems do differ, hard drive size is listed by its UNFORMATTED size - before it's prepared and the software is loaded up...

Since a hard drive HAS to be formatted, you'll lose around 5-9% of the unformatted size, on average (9 Gb means 7.5%, so you're in the ball park).

Then the system (OS X) and applications DO take up space - 20 Gb is about right.

Answer 3

mac programs are generally big in size. The operating system or ur OS will take at least 8-9 gigs that's including all the programs that came with ur macbook.

Answer 4

9 is in the ballpark.