The answer depends on the context, and it’s a classic debate between marketing and technical definitions.
In marketing and storage device labels, a gigabyte (GB) is often defined as 1000 megabytes (MB). This is based on the decimal system (powers of 10), where 1 GB equals 10910^9 bytes. It’s a user-friendly way to describe capacity, but it can be misleading.
In technical and computing terms, a gigabyte is traditionally defined as 1024 megabytes. This stems from the binary system (powers of 2), where 1 GB equals 2302^{30} bytes. Technically, this is referred to as a gibibyte (GiB) to distinguish it from the decimal version.
So, while your phone might say it has 128 GB of storage, your computer may report a slightly lower capacity due to the difference in these definitions. Knowing the context helps clear up the confusion!
