In (grudging) praise of portability...

I've been buying records (as in: vinyl and CDs, with occasional downloads and even-less-frequent tapes) since 1975. Portability-- the capability to play my music anyplace I wanted-- was never a big concern for me. I had a home with a bedroom with a stereo and speakers and headphones, so I had someplace to play music... why did I need to take it with me?
Then in my senior year of high school, I found myself splitting my school days between two schools (my home high school and an arts magnet school about an hour's commute away)... and around the same time, boomboxes started appearing on the market. I begged my parents and for Christmas that year, got them to get me a Panasonic mini boombox, which I stuck in a dufflebag and carried on the bus to school with me, so I'd have music for the long bus trip to and from the magnet school.
At that time, my tapes were almost all homemade cassettes: dubs of albums I liked, or mix tapes. The two I remember from that year were Paul McCartney's TUG OF WAR and a cassette of Simon and Garfunkel's CONCERT IN CENTRAL PARK which I taped by sticking my boombox in front of the TV speaker while the special ran on HBO. They weren't the only two cassettes I carried with me in that bag, but they were the two I listened to most often.
And seriously, there would not have been much room for many tapes in that bag. The boombox itself took up a lot of space, as did the towel in which I wrapped it (insulated against droppage), and after that, there was room for eight, maybe nine tapes in there. Assuming that each of those cassettes was a C90, which usually held an album's worth of music per 45 minute side, this means that I had possibly 16 albums worth of music in that bag. Not bad, but certainly a drop in the bucket compared to what I had at home (400 or 500 45s and about 200 albums). So I had to be selective: I had to tape what I most wanted to hear. And blank cassettes weren't cheap...
Portability was problematic, in other words.
To use a tape metaphor, fast forward to a couple days ago. I synced my iPhone, and for some reason, found that my iphone had gotten clotted up with apps and programs, and that I could only sync 802 tracks to the ipod in my phone.
"Only" 802!
After deleting some files on my iphone and re-syncing the ipod, I was able to squeeze another 97 tracks onto it with some space left over for photos-etc. So now I've got 899 tracks on my iphone. In other words, assuming an average of 14 tracks per album, a device that is around the same size as one of those cassettes which held, at most, two albums, now is carrying the equivalent of around 64 albums.
I'm not entirely sold on digital music, and I still prefer to have a good stereo and albums, for reasons I've both enumerated and have yet to enumerate on this blog.
But the 18-year-old Max who carried that big duffle bag back and forth on the bus would be envious of that iphone.