So they need to overprovision, and compensate for effects - that is fine.
However, only advertising "usable size" is truthful, everything else is misleading.
It is sad that the legal system tolerates such cheating because it makes it harder to find the actual properties of the product. Or even makes it impossible to actually know how the product will actually work.
It's shockingly common nowadays to advertise things with an upper limit, rather than something like expected value. They're just saying, "we won't tell you what it is, but there's no way it's more than this". Bizarre that it seems to be effective.
Was just looking at this with internet service last night. Though I can understand where they're almost forced into that, since explaining that you can't get 1Gig speed from a random server that isn't serving that fast would be impossible to a lot of people.
But, the cable company doesn't disappoint -- since I can't find the price of an upgrade without calling, nor mention of upload speeds.
Cable companies are the worst I wish politicians will have a look at their practices (and their more than likely illegal price fixing) but their lobbyists are strong.
> I saw a billboard for a lottery, it said "estimated lotto jackpot 55 million." See, I did not know that shit was estimated. That would suck if you won and they go, "oh, sorry, we were off by two zeros. We estimate that you are angry!"
> I saw a billboard for a lottery, it said "estimated lotto jackpot 55 million." See, I did not know that shit was estimated.
It’s estimated because they don’t know exactly how many tickets will be sold leading up to the next drawing. I’ve not tracked it, but the times I’ve seen, were under 1-2 percentage points. If it bothers you that they said “estimated $55M” and instead you win $54,333,187.42, is it really that bad?
I can imagine a perverse population of customers whose elasticity function prevents the estimate from ever being correct by always buying too many tickets.
> If you don't know the answer, underestimate and overdeliver.
Make up your mind, is estimating bad or not? The example I gave isn’t the only possible outcome, some times it’s 1-2% more than quoted when more tickets were sold.
Not sure how this is about democracy or otherwise. Regulation exists in various countries, for example regarding internet plan speeds. In Germany, ISPs can’t just slap on “up to 300 Mbit/s” on the plan and then say “oh it’s only 50 Mbit/s at your house, tough luck”. Performance sucks (conditions apply)? Pay less or cancel immediately (without notice period).
Ah, but they can slap “up to 300 Mbit/s” on the plan and then hope you won't notice, which most user's won't. If the worst that can happen to them is that you get out of long contracts (which shouldn't even be the norm to begin with) then that's hardly an argument that we have effective regulation.
There's nothing bizarre here: there are enough people in those democracies, who believe regulating this is either not a good idea or not high enough priority
I doubt think that's true at all. In most representative democracies (UK here) we just don't have the ability to vote on such fine-grained legislation. If you asked the person in the street "should companies be held to absolutely strict truth in advertising for quantitative claims", once you explained what it meant (!), I'd warrant the vast majority would agree, yes they should.
It's anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products. Markets can't optimise if you allow misinformation.
>If you asked the person in the street "should companies be held to absolutely strict truth in advertising for quantitative claims", once you explained what it meant (!), I'd warrant the vast majority would agree, yes they should.
This overestimates support because you're vague on what the policy actually is, so everyone thinks that it's going to be their preferred variant being implemented. See: the brexit vote which got a majority vote for "yes", but in reality the none of the individual proposals got majority approval.
If hypothetically 10% of the population said A but you slice up B into specific enough buckets then A wins even if the overwhelming majority dislike A.
Brexit was only a policy question if you combined two different questions. “Should we stay in the EU?” and “What kind of foreign policy should we have?” People answering Yes to the first question also had plenty of diversity in how they wanted to answer the second question.
> If hypothetically 10% of the population said A but you slice up B into specific enough buckets then A wins even if the overwhelming majority dislike A.
Yes, if you're only allowed to vote for a single option. If you're allowed to vote yes/no for each option, or rank them from best to worst, then this problem doesn't happen.
Well, you can ask your representative to represent you, right?
I live in a place with direct democracy and it's much less regulated than the UK. Therefore the link between having the ability and actually regulating more is not obvious to me.
> anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products
Is it though? I mean, it might be bad, but I don't see how it's necessarily anti-democratic, as it has little to do with the governance model.
They do, especially outside of the United States, but there’s also a ton of corporate money spent to promote libertarian ideology so a non-trivial number of voters believe that regulation is inherently harmful.
Read the top comment about misleading or deceptive conduct in the EU. There is a similar regime in Australia and companies don’t do it lest they face steep fines and lawsuits with good payouts and very few defences available. Good democracies regard this kind of law as a necessary part of capitalism, because it harms not only the consumer but the entire system. Maybe yours hasn’t figured it out yet.
I dare say that "actual storage less" (and other equivalent phrases) are now past the point of covering for the discrepancy.
5%+ of missing capacity is definitely large enough for the actual expected capacity to be used for marketing.
This is also something that should find its way into smartphones. Samsung's are notorious for using significant amounts of the advertised storage for bundled marketing apps that cannot be removed.
> I dare say that "actual storage less" (and other equivalent phrases) are now past the point of covering for the discrepancy.
I think the original reason for that disclaimer was due to filesystem formatting, not for the GB -> GiB discrepancy or providing less usable bytes on the block device than advertised.
If you read the article, the same is true in the SanDisk case. The module is still a 16 GB module, and “A portion of the total capacity is used to store certain functions including optimizations of the memory that support performance and endurance and therefore is not available for user storage.”
I think it's slightly different in that it changed though. A 16gb iPhone always meant that there was a 16gb storage module inside the device and then some of it was used for the OS (how much of it has varied over time however, which I agree is a problem)
In the sandisk case, at least from what I understand, it that 16Gb used to mean like a 17Gb module, with 1Gb used for system functions, now it's a 16Gb module with 1Gb used for system functions
Since there are no 17 GB modules (to my knowledge), they would have had to combine modules of different sizes. The f3 output in the article also states 16 GB for both drives. The old drive already only exposed 14.9 GB (GiB) of usable space. So it seems to me that is is only a quantitative change, not a qualitative one.
Phones are actually worse in that a mere OS update can decrease the amount of free space, which is something that presumably does not happen with USB drive firmware updates.
Are all the sizes really that even? Despite weird layer counts and stacking counts and typically doing 3 bits per cell?
Still, a 16GiB module would be 17 billion bytes. No need to combine different sizes. Unless you're saying a single module would have a decimal capacity?
If you take a 16GiB module and sell it as 16 billion bytes then that gives you 7% overprovisioning. Overprovisioning 10% would give you a 15.4 billion byte drive. If you want 16GiB then it's a quantitative change of how much you lose. But if you go by their promise of 16 billion bytes then it's a qualitative change that they broke the promise.
Even iPhones aren't immune to getting bad blocks. The system files category is a catch-all that includes the reserved blocks for remapping by FTL when blocks go bad. As storage tiers get bigger, so does the number of reserved cells, in absolute terms.
Why do I as the user care about how much storage is physically on the system? Are they going to start counting the firmware storage on the WiFi chip next?
As the user I care about how much storage I can use, and how durable it is. If the storage is used by the OS it isn't helpful to me, other than the "runs iOS" feature point.
(This does get slightly complicated if the OS space changes with updates, what number is best to explain to the user in this case. It isn't entirely clear but I can ensure you that if an OS update takes 30GiB more space users aren't going to care that that storage is still in their phone)
> Why do I as the user care about how much storage is physically on the system? Are they going to start counting the firmware storage on the WiFi chip next?
Most Android phones use separate partitions for OS and user data so they could advertise how much user storage they are giving you (as they are very unlikely to re-partition during an update). However AFAIK all manufactures report the full storage size, not just user storage.
However, only advertising "usable size" is truthful, everything else is misleading.
It is sad that the legal system tolerates such cheating because it makes it harder to find the actual properties of the product. Or even makes it impossible to actually know how the product will actually work.