> Frequencies are irrelevant.
No they're not. They're very relavent for anything dealing with networkig and communications.
I recently programmed an atmega chip for a homebrew project and the frequency of the SPI bus was very relavent.
They are not relevant to measures of information storage. A megahertz is as irrelevant in this debate as a centimeter, or kilopascal --- except to the extent that it bolsters the argument that mega means million in all kinds of units, which nobody is disputing.
Nobody wants base 10 to go away. Just away from the prefixes in kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte!
"Giga" and "mega" do not mean exactly a million or billion; they are the root of words like "megalomania" and "gigantic".
Mega: From Ancient Greek μέγας (mégas, “great, large, mighty”), from Proto-Indo-European meǵh₂s (“great”). Cognate with Latin magnus, and with Germanic words: Gothic 𐌼𐌹𐌺𐌹𐌻𐍃 (mikils), Old English micel, Middle English muchel, English much, Old High German mihhil, Old Norse mikill, Danish meget.* [Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mega-]
Giga: From Ancient Greek γίγας (gígas, “giant”); cognate to giant. [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/giga-]
Nothing about a million or billion!
Kilo is the one that means one thousand, from Greek. (χίλιοι / khílioi).
> Why should the capacity of memory chips affect how we describe file sizes and drive sizes?
So that, for example, a gigabyte of swap space corresponds exactly to a gigabyte of RAM. Doh? Who wants the description of size to change when data is moved between RAM and disk?
Speaking of "memory chips", flash storage is memory chips too. We should use the same units for memory chips that we use for ... memory chips.