IPhone storage available vs used

Question

I have 16 gb iPhone 4S. Under storage it shows I have used 10.9 gb and have free 2.7 gb. This only adds up to 13.6gb total. Where is the rest of my gb and why would the amt be off like that?

Answer 1

Because you only had about 13.6GB's of usable space available to begin with. The answer has to do with electronic devices and their operating systems using a different definition of "gigabyte" ("GB") than that of the manufacturer's of storage devices such as memory cards and hard drives use. When manufacturers of such devices say "GB", they mean what is called a "decimal gigabyte", which equals exactly 1,000,000,000 (one billion) bytes. When your device's operating system describes the capacity of the storage, they use what is called a "binary gigabyte", which equals exactly 1,073,741,824 bytes. Because of this discrepancy, a device has less binary gigabytes than decimal gigabytes. It turns out that a decimal gigabyte is approximately 93% the size of a binary gigabyte, so if your iphone is 16 decimal gigabytes, your operating system will report that it is approximately: 16 * 0.93 = 14.8 binary gigabytes, minus what the OS occupies, equals 13.6GB's.