I disagree. As Michael Bolton said, "Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!"
Kilo, mega, and other prefixes predate computer storage, and SI is beautiful because it is consistent. The computer industry decided to use standard prefixes with non-standard (base-2) quantities. Now let's cut our losses and return to consistency with everything else.
You're not disagreeing. Parent is talking about the measurement units changing, whereas you're saying the meaning of the SI prefixes shouldn't change. You can have both: require KiB, MiB, etc.
I'd be all for that. Please standardize your measurements to one unit, and use constant logarithmically incrementing indicators for larger amounts of these units. Better yet: do not base them on (or name them after) a unit that differs for each person (why does my foot measure 0'11"?)
The problem is that “kibibyte”, “mebibyte”, “gibibyte”, etc. are extremely ugly words whose existence is fundamentally offensive. If you heard anyone say them aloud you’d think they were a toddler with a speech impediment.
I always thought it should just have been "binary/decimal kilobyte" etc which would have neatly sidestepped the awkwardness of saying those words out loud and would have also likely satisfied most people who preferred using the traditional-within-computing binary meanings. In theory that would be universally applicable to any units and any base. Instead we have this ugly linguistic hack.
I'm sure they were picked specifically because they sound bad. Using only the the first letter would probably work for the US (e.g. kbytes) since it wouldn't step on SI's toes.
Sectors are 512bytes or 4096bytes and there are base-2 prefixes. Using base 10 in a base 2 world is consumer fraud and they only do it because they can deliver less.
The hardware is using sizes in powers of 2 because it's the only sensible thing to do, and numbers would be very annoying for users if the units didn't account for it.
Changing to gibibytes does very little - the users confused by 1024 do not know about the alternate prefixes.
Furthermore, if you just add the "i" to all measurements, then you have accomplished nothing with regards to SI prefix proliferation. Everything but one dialog in a single OS will still use 1024, and HDD manufacturers will still use 1000.
I say this because most regular folks don’t even know what a gigabyte is so asking them to understand what a gibibyte is does not really “solve the problem” of consumer understanding.
Kilo, mega, and other prefixes predate computer storage, and SI is beautiful because it is consistent. The computer industry decided to use standard prefixes with non-standard (base-2) quantities. Now let's cut our losses and return to consistency with everything else.