No, the operating system on the new Galaxy S23 does not take up 60GB of space | Hacker News Reader

No, the operating system on the new Galaxy S23 does not take up 60GB of space

phonearena.com

31 pointswvenable12 comments

"Our software isn't bloated, it just can't do maths!" isn't the great defence one may think it is.

It's perfectly understandable that the used space can be indicated in GB instead of GiB, but the total size also shows GB. The phone claims 512GB of total space, not the 476GiB this article would suggest.

In other words: the phone lies. It claims 512GB on the box but when you try to use that, you end up with less actual usable space. Samsung, of course, doesn't want to label their phone as 476GiB when their boxes say 512GB so I doubt they'll fix it with accurate numbers.

Sure, you can fix the correction, but the progress bar and the section of unusable space is still just as big.

The difference between the OS being 4 times as large as Windows 11 vs. a small math issue in the Settings app is massive.

This is kinda like when ISPs advertise their speeds in megabits per second when the entire world uses megabytes.

People call support asking why their speeds aren’t as advertised and ISPs have the audacity to go “well ackchyually”.

This is a follow up to the HN thread last week that had over 373 comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34682225

A reminder that extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.

What ever happened to using GiB to avoid confusion?

Also, I don't buy it being a bug with that, that'd mean the app is doing its space calculations in gigabytes internally, instead of in bytes. Who does that?

It's probably empty storage over-provisioning space.

For those like me who wanted to know the actual OS size:

> So how much storage space does the Android system actually use on the Galaxy S23 series? The answer is about 20GB, which is still a lot but not nearly as much as the 60GB that the system settings report.

Oh I get it, they are atrributing the base 10 to base 2 loss to the os, so as sotrage increases the "os" appears to eat that space.

Probably was an interesting meeting about this at some point.

“ Unfortunately, mobile operating systems would mistakenly report you as having the full 512GB”

What is this weird excuse, as if it’s some kind of mobile technical limitation that the device has to lie about available space?

At the end of the day, even 20GB is still huge for an operating system. If its almost double that of Windows 11 that's just silly.

I suppose in Samsungs defence, they probably put it in "System" to avoid creating another excuse to put it in an "Other" category.

The problem here was with tech articles just assuming things and creating news out of it.

I am considering this phone and the previous news took it off my radar. Probably cost them sales.

Yeah, it would have taken it out of my consideration as well. But even at the time, the conclusion didn't sit well with me. There was no way that the system took that much space.

An entire damning article was written about this and went viral merely from the reporting of space from the Settings app in the phone. No other attempt was made to verify this information or even confirm what was using that space if it turned out be true.

And this "correction" posting on HN will likely not make it to the front page or have nearly the discussion the original article had.

Most of this looks right, but they completely screwed up the math for 512GB. I think they took the correct number for 256 gigs and then added 256 instead of doubling it. And also rounded something slightly wrong. So it was only 3.5% off.

But the numbers for 128, 256, and 1TB are all fine.

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