Apple, others sued over hard drive size claims

Source: MacMinute.com

Apple, others sued over hard drive size claims
September 18, 2003 - 17:24 EDT A group of computer owners has filed a class action lawsuit against Apple and other personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives. "According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system," reports Reuters. "The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 18.6 gigabytes of readable capacity." Others named in the suit, which was filed earlier this week in Los Angeles Superior Court, are Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba. The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees.

My Comments: Ok I do agree I think they should be a bit more upfront with the sizes of the hard drives.. it surprises me everytime for a couple seconds.. then I remember that fact and then I go on. I do not agree about restitution or disgorgement, but I do agree about the attorney's fees and the days in court that these people missed work.. other than that.. it's like Apple Corp. wanting a piece of the pie... it's like many of the lawsuits against Microsoft..

That's ghey, they shouldn't have even bothered with it, so if they missed work that's their fault.

People are just wanting to find a cheap way to become rich. It's pathetic.

The judge, probably knowing nothing about computers will most likely give into the "others" favor >.<

sKaD

I guess nobody reads the fine print these days. Taken directly from the label on my iBook box (as a numbered "footnote" to the hard drive specifications): "1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less".

You know I have never thought about HD space much after they jumped from like 5Gb to 60Gb what does it matter? so its like 1 or 2 GB behind what it says.. its a aprox. They get the drives from the factory that way, thats the way they advertise them! Would they rather want apple to put on the display 18.6 GB? then they would get pist its actually 18.652123445, tis a load.

i remember when i first went from an old 2gb gateway pc my family had to a 27gb dell about 5 or 6 years ago and it was confusin the **** outta me as to why it only said like 25.27 or whatever it was but now with drives being so big and so cheap it doesnt matter. my powerbook has a 40gb on it which is actually only 37.25 but then i have a 120gb firewire drive right next to me so it doesnt really matter

Graphite said:

You know I have never thought about HD space much after they jumped from like 5Gb to 60Gb what does it matter? so its like 1 or 2 GB behind what it says.. its a aprox. They get the drives from the factory that way, thats the way they advertise them! Would they rather want apple to put on the display 18.6 GB? then they would get pist its actually 18.652123445, tis a load.

Click to expand...

Yah, i totally agree but with that said, the reason why the HD doesn't reflect it's true capacity is because of the file system on the disk it'self. [ But that's only a tiny explanation ]. File Systems can take up a marginal space. But with that said if they are referring to the HD which also contains the Operating System... then the 1.4Gig in question, lost - is pretty self explanatory.

Don't these people also realize that EVERYONE is being wronged equally? If no one else is suing.. perhaps they are wrong. Or neglecting that, wont EVERYONE have to get the same reward for this wronging? it just doesn't make much sense. No one else cares, do us all a favor fix your genetic defect by artificially selecting yourself out of the gene pool

good point. if they do win i want a share of the cash though =)

Yes, this is not like a drug lawsuit which is what they seem to try to make this into. Not a select population was lied to and "misled', not just a few people who took this information expect it to cure their HD problems. EVERYONE did, I see no case, its so crazy.

what are they trying to get the companies on....it cant be false advertising since they always put the 1gb=1 million bytes (actual formatted capacity less).....there are no grounds for this case.

trpnmonkey41 said:

what are they trying to get the companies on....it cant be false advertising since they always put the 1gb=1 million bytes (actual formatted capacity less).....there are no grounds for this case.

Click to expand...

I think you meant, 1gb = 1 billion bytes. Otherwise, spot on

yep a letter off. i was on a school retreat for 3 days so haven't been on a computer since then so im a little off on accuracy on everything. i was deprived

actually I am quite certain it is not them specifically that they are asking for restitution.. it's pretty much anybody that has purchased those companies hard drives that will benefit from it. Everyone will get a piece of the pie, but I don't think that's the point.. I would rather them spend that money on new packaging if indeed they have to change the info, and on new technology.. I don't feel like I was hurt in anyway, but I do think that they should explain the actual disk space a little better.. They want their drives to look bigger than they are.. that's marketing for you, but I agree.. it's not very fair marketing

The law suit is a big joke. Does it mean that I should get some money for every hard dirsk I have purchased over the years. I think not. As most of us computer people know. It depends on how the disk are formatted, inorder to figure out the size of available disk space.