MarkHastings
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2003
- Messages
- 12,013
oops :b
Can someone post an example of a deceptive ad in this category?I can't post an exact example, but I can create a situation based on my own personal experiences and facts about the internet:
Let's look at internet shopping. Just look at all the price comparison engines there are. Take 2 companies that have an 18.6 GB HD -
Company A sells the drive for $190 and advertises it as an 18.6 GB HD
whereas
Company B sells it for $195 and advertises it as a 20 GB HD (with it's 1 GB = 1 billion bytes fine print).
So company A sounds like they're selling at $10.21 per Gig and Company B is selling at $9.75 per Gig.
In an online comparison, company B would seem overall cheaper, yet they are actually selling the same exact Hard Drive as Company A for $5 more.
Since a lot of online sites (especially the cheaper ones) don't give a whole heck of a lot of info, there can be times when someone is looking for a bargain and may actually be spending MORE money than they should.
Again, maybe people like us would have enough knowledge to do some more searching to find out exact numbers, but when the average consumer is shown two hard drives for the same price and one boasts 18.6 GB and the other boasts 20GB, they'll almost always go with the (seemingly) bigger drive.
I see this "1 GB = 1 billion bytes" only as a tactic to make things seem larger than they are. As long as everyone does it, I guess it's ok, but considering there seems to be no standard (i.e. the companies are choosing to put fine print to make up whatever they'd like), than I say YES we need to do something legally about it to clear up this mess.
I am completely opposed to this kind of lawsuit. As a consumer, i see zero benefit.This isn't a case of "the minute difference doesn't make much difference to most people", it's a matter of lying and deception. To me, deception is 110% worthy of any law suit.
EXAMPLE: Most people have no need (or could care less) for the ability to drive thier car at 190mph, but if a company boasts that thier car can do 190mph and it CAN'T, then there is plenty of reason why they should be sued.
It shouldn't matter if nobody is ever going to drive that fast - that's not the point.
Suppose you bought a pound of hamburger, but found that you only got 373 grams instead of 454 grams because they decided to sell it by troy weight? Would this not be considered deceptive marketing?Mike, I understand your position, I just don't agree.
In the above example, it wouldn't matter at all as long as there was an industry standard. If all burger joints who sold a pound burger sold you the same 373 grams because the word "pound" means something that is commonly understood in the hamburger industry, there really is no problem. When you buy a pounder, as a consumer, you know what your'e getting because all pounders are the same. Same is true in the HD industry. There is an accepted industry standard for measuring the volume of a HD.
I suggest that anyone who is going to split hairs and notice the "deficiency and deception" is educated enough to make an informed decision about how much HD space they need. Do your math and buy enough flash memory or HD space.
Profit margins in the HDD manufacturing industry are very tiny to begin with. If you think the costs of this suit won't be passed to consumers, I'd say you are naive.
John G
A drive mfg can't state the XP figure because not everybody runs XP.The operating system is irrelveant. All operating systems that I have ever worked with and still work with (totalling over a dozen operating systems and variants) all recognize 1 KB at 1024, 1 MB as 1024^2, and 1 GB as 1024^3. There is no operating system that I know of that recognizes 1 GB as 10^9. Therefore, the hard drive manufacturers are intentionally inflating their numbers to make it look like their hard drive supports capacities that are more than what they should be. Suddenly, the computer isee the hard drive and translates to 1024^3 power which results in what appears to be a loss of capacity.
It's deceptive advertising, plain and simple, whether you agree with the lawsuit or not.
How about this? You buy a car that is advertised as sitting 6 comfortably, but if I, and 5 of my friends, all weigh over 350 lbs, would we fit - comfortably?I see absolutely no relevance to this argument. A byte cannot take up extra space because of the digital equivalent to overeating. A byte takes up a single byte of space - period. What's at issue here is the improper use of accepted, industry standard terminology for the intentionally deceptive purpose of inflating the percieved storage capacity. In other words, "false advertising" which last time I looked is illegal.