What the Tech?!

Welcome to, Refinery29's weekly column explaining the basics behind a buzzword or concept you've heard tossed around in conversation (but maybe don't actually understand).When you're buying a new phone, you likely have to choose between 16, 32, 64, and 128 gigabyte variations. But, what in the heck does that even mean? Like a foot or a meter is a unit of measure for distance, a gigabyte is a unit of measure for digital data. For reference, you've got something like 10.8 or 13.1 GB of storage in your Gmail inbox. And you may pay for 3 GB of data per month on your Verizon plan. Here's how it works.Data is stored or transmitted as binary bits — a one or a zero. A byte is eight bits, a series of eight ones and zeros. But one byte doesn't hold a ton of information (only a standard text character , for example). So our phones and computers need a lot of them in order to store our apps, documents, photos, and other data.The prefixes we generally use for these measurements are kilo, mega, giga, and tera. One kilobyte is roughly 1,000 bytes, one megabyte is 1,000 kilobytes, and one gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes. This means that your 64 GB phone actually stores more than 67 million bytes