Montrealer Sues Apple Inc

In the paper a couple of weeks ago, I came across an article about a Montreal law student, David Bitton, who is suing Apple Inc, makers of the iPod. The suit claims that they falsely advertise that the iPod contains 8 GB of memory. In fact, the iPod has 7.45 GB of memory (7.5% less memory than advertised).

He is suing Apple for a refund of the price of the iPod ($225 CDN). Failing that, he wants the cost of his iPod less 7.5% (ha!) plus $75 CDN in damages. His lawyer also filed for permission to make this a class action suit on behalf of all iPod owners in Quebec.

When I started reading the article I thought, what the heck? He’s suing a large corporation over 7.5% less memory for $225 CDN? That’s absurd. Then I read Apple’s reasoning for the memory discrepancy.

The company chalks the discrepancy up to the definition of a megabyte (1 gigabyte = 1000 x 1 megabyte). Apparently a megabyte is defined as 1 million bytes by hard disk manufacturers and 1.048576 million bytes by computer manufacturers. Huh? A megabyte a measure of computer memory (whether memory or disk space) in bytes. Computers deal only in ones and zeros (binary). So the amount of memory must be a power of 2. One million is not a power of two; but 1.048576 million (= 2^20) is.

In fact, the law student came upon the discrepancy using iTunes software to download music to his iPod. Hmm, iTunes is Apple's software and it uses 1.048576 million as the definition of a megabyte.

Me thinks that Apple marketing went with the definition that best suited their purpose.