Binary vs Decimal Byte Units

Megabytes (1000^2, MB) or mebibytes (1024^2, MiB)?

Unit prefixes should be unambiguous: 1 GB = 1000 MB; 1 GiB = 2^10 MiB. People who say 1 GB = 1024 MB are wrong. Let's not perpetuate this slip in judgment (while acknowledging that many programs still do use this misbegotten system)

What's your objection? It should be mibibytes?

"we" should use GiB, but in practice (almost) no one really does. Hence the confusion...

hard drives intentionally use giga and tera rather than gibi and tebi. They're right; it's the memory sticks that are usually wrong :-)

If you want to be really pedantic, differentiate SI giga/megabytes as GB/MB and "binary" gibi/mebibytes as GiB/MiB

Windows (at least up to 8) does not follow the SI standard. It uses KB, MB, GB but converts using 1024. Which has funny consequences, like 999MB being smaller 0.94GB.

Hard disks are typically sold with 1000-based units and memory is typically sold with 1024-based units: the market is inconsistent, and therefore so is the user interface; if you by 512 MB of RAM you get 512 MiB, but if you buy 1 TB of disk, you get only like 0.9 TiB, and so if you have a UI showing you how much space a file takes up it should (sadly) likely work different from a UI showing you how much space a process takes up :(.

MB never consistently meant MiB.

Windows uses GB (gigabytes) to mean GiB (gibibytes), MB (megabytes) to mean MiB (mebibytes), and so on because basically noone in the real world adopted IEC's renaming scheme.Linux (to include Android) and the BSDs (to include MacOS, and iOS?) use GB (gigabytes) to mean decimal GB (gigabytes), a conversion factor basically noone in the real world adopted because multiples of 1000 are meaningless.So the vast majority of people and Windows to this day understand a kilobyte as 1024 bytes