Afaik for storage it's exactly what it says on the tin: a 1GB drive is exactly 1,000,000,000 Bytes. Then you put it in the computer and Windows, who thinks that 1GB = 1,073,741,824 Bytes says, well that's a 0.93 GB drive, aka 930MB. So you start asking yourself where those 70MB went, while in reality windows is telling you that the drive is 930MiB, which is equal to 1GB.

As for networking, last I checked we use Megabits and Gigabits for that, which are a whole different can of worms and use a small b instead of a big B. 8 Mb = 1 MB

I've never seen anyone use Mebibit, if it exists, which I'm not sure it does.

And as for benefit, I'm not sure whose benefit it is to create this confusion. In my opinion, no one's, as the drive makers get accused of false marketing while at the same time Windows gets accused of being a broken OS (fair)

Hmm, never heard that before. Idk how to link to a specific section of a page, but what I'm talking about is there too, one section down.

An alternate system of nomenclature for the same units (referred to here as the customary convention), in which 1 kilobyte (KB) is equal to 1,024 bytes,[38][39][40] 1 megabyte (MB) is equal to 10242 bytes and 1 gigabyte (GB) is equal to 10243 bytes is mentioned by a 1990s JEDEC standard. Only the first three multiples (up to GB) are mentioned by the JEDEC standard, which makes no mention of TB and larger. The customary convention is used by the Microsoft Windows operating system[41][better source needed] and random-access memory capacity, such as main memory and CPU cache size, and in marketing and billing by telecommunication companies, such as Vodafone,[42] AT&T,[43] Orange[44] and Telstra.[45]

For storage capacity, the customary convention was used by macOS and iOS through Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and iOS 10, after which they switched to units based on powers of 10.[34]

1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm VS 1m = 12dm = 144cm = 1728mm

That's obviously not what I'm talking about.

To make a base 12 system work, you'd need to change the numerical system also, by adding two new digits, like we do for hexadecimal numbers, so you'd have ...8-9-A-B-10, where A = 10 and B = 11 (in 10 base), so that 1m = 10dm = 100cm but in base 12.

Yes exactly. It's equally as easy to do both. Counting to base 10 isn't easier than doing it to base 12 or base 6. But 10 is just a kind of shitty number. That's why imperial tends to use 12 because its better. They just changed the wrong thing. Metric should use base 12.

Changing it would be a ball ache. 12 is better than 10 though.

Yeah but it doesn't have the same schwag as base 60

Granted, but it divides by two multiple times. Take a good, round number like 1024 and you can halve it 10 times in a row.

The metric system handles thirds by just using multiples. Like, you buy a 1200 wide benchtop and then you can fit a three 400 drawers under it.

You could technically do the same in hex and the base numbers are all (x^y + x^(y+1)) which represent well.

Or you can count in binary, and get to over 1000 on ten fingers