Mac OS X Snow Leopard: More Usable Storage Space, a Myth?

According to Apple’s Snow Leopard web site, the new cat has a smaller footprint:

Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you — enough for about 1,750 more songs or a few thousand more photos.

One  of the reasons could be related to the PowerPC code removal within the universal binaries.  Secondly, it is related to the new compiler and linker, which generates a small size of target code.  The third reason, which not much people are paying attention to, is the way how to convert from bytes to KB, MB, GB, or TB.

For the past few years, Microsoft Windows uses the base of 10 to calculate storage size.  In computing world, 1MB = 1024KB.  On the other hand, 1MB = 1000KB in metric world.  In other words, a hard drive that has 10,485,760 bytes of available space will be shown as 10.49GB in Windows but only 10GB in pre-Snow Leopard.  Now, in Snow Leopard, we will see 10.49GB instead of 10GB.

Do you see the magic there?