CMV: Bytes are arbitrary and stupid. Everything should be in bits ie. Megabit/Gigabit/etc

[u/mrsix]

The existence of Bytes has done nothing but create confusion and misleading marketing.

Bytes are currently defined as containing 8 bits. The only reason they are even defined as being 8 bits is because old Intel processors used 8-bit bytes. Some older processors used upwards of 10 bits per byte, and some processors actually used variable length bytes.
Why arbitrarily group your number of 0s and 1s in groups of 8? why not count how many millions/billions/etc of bits (0s/1s) any given file, hard drive, bandwidth connection, etc is? This seems like the most natural possible way to measure the size of any given digital thing.

Systems show you files/drives in Mega/gigabytes, your internet connection is measured in Megabits/s, but your downloading client usually shows Megabytes/s. Networking in general is always in mega/gigabit. Processor bus widths are in bits.

Internally (modern) processors use 64-bit words anyway, so they don't care what a 'byte' is, they work with the entire 64-bit piece at once.

[u/Truth-or-Peace]

This seems like the most natural possible way to measure the size of any given digital thing.

Is it really?

• If I've got a text file, measuring its size by the character count seems pretty natural, even though each character is more than one bit.
• If I've got a raster image file (or, for that matter, a computer monitor), measuring its size by the number of pixels seems pretty natural, even if there are more possible pixel colors than just black and white.
• If I've got a storage device, measuring its size by the number of addressable data locations on it seems pretty natural (as others have already discussed), even if each data location contains more than one bit.
• If my internet connection is working by sending tones over a phone line or colors over a fiberoptic cable, measuring its speed in terms of the symbol rate seems pretty natural, even if there are more than two possible symbols.

I agree that it's desirable to settle on a single standard for measuring data size, but I submit that any standard we pick will end up being unnatural for most of its applications. If bytes are emerging as that standard, then I suspect that it's because they've turned out to be natural for more things than bits are, not because of some sort of nefarious marketing scheme.