Correct Byte Math?

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Imagine you have a set of files that totals this many bytes: 67,403,773

If you wanted to display the number of kilobytes, what math would you use to make this calculation? Ditto if you wanted to calculate the number of megabytes, what math would you use?

I had long thought that the correct math was this: 67403773 / (1024 x 1024) = 64.28 MB

But my MacBook is saying the correct value is simply 67.4 MB

What's the correct approach in 2022? And if the MacBook is correct why, in fact are we not dividing by 1,024 bytes per kilobyte?

math byte
1 Answers

this is common misconception ...

Because in past on computing related topics:

1 KByte = 1024 Bytes
1 MByte = 1024 KBytes

as 1024 is 2^10 However latter on it was establised to change the terminology in order to avoid conflicts with physical Kilo/Mega/... magnitudes related to factor 1000 ... So now on it should be:

1 KByte = 1000 Byte
1 MByte = 1000 KByte
1 KiByte = 1024 Byte
1 MiByte = 1024 KiByte

However this "new" standard is not well (or at all me included) accepted in computing community and KByte,MByte,TByte... in most cases means factor of 1024

As mentioned in the comments some use factor of 1000 to visually enlarge storing capacity (for marketing purposes) but that is just a trick and not the real value ...

user_25212140
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