Actually my taste changes with my mood, thus I bring all my music with me, also, would you really wanna travel 6-10 hours (one way) with just 2GB of music? Anyway, I also bring Audiobooks and in some cases pictures on my iPod too, thus 2GB would do me no good.
And besides, I do have a 1GB iPod Shuffle which I got just for such times where I only need music (and I got it cos it was cheaper and easier (no additional site signups which I hate) to get than anything else that was around at the time, it was on sale cos the new model was coming out in a month or something) and am not going anywhere too far from my comp.
See the thing with the big iPod is that you take it with you on long trips, like I'm out of touch with my comp for 2+ weeks right now, would you wanna listen to the same album for 2+ weeks? I sure as hell don't.
1) Yes I have different moods, nothing that cannot be covered with say....6 hours of total music allowing for lots of variety, which can fit in 2-4gb no problem. I don't want to carry my entire collection I'll get into that in a bit
2) I took a big trip without a computer, in fact I was without regular access for 4.5 months total. I had a 2gb player and filled it up with my mp3-dvd every 2 or 3 weeks maybe. Your hyperbole its quite frankly stupid: Not even with 100% uncompressed FLAC files can you fit only 2 albums, you can easily fit at least 5 albums on quality that is too good for crappy earphones anyway. And with regular quality I can fit 10-15 full albums. And most albums have lots of fluff or songs I don't particularly feel like keeping so in reality thats lots of variety, enough for 2+ weeks unless you are confined to some sort of torture chamber with nothing but music.
3) Having your entire collection its actually counterproductive and I will tell you why. I own a Nintendo DS, and I have something in the neighborhood of 10 games for it ( NDS games plus a few gameboy advance games since it can read those ). All of them but Metroid Zero mission and Metroid Prime Hunters are RPGs. I love to play em and I usually only take a single game or two games with me ( a GBA game and a DS game ). If I will have a trip I bring a small DS pouch/wallet thing with maybe 4 or 5 games.
Before that I used to have a flash card, the M3DS real. I found myself carrying always 15-20 roms on my 2gb card. And I never really enjoyed it, I usually played a game for a few minutes and turn it off. It was simply too many games to choose from, specially the kind of games that I like ( RPGs ) which are not simple "pick up and play" games ( seriously, is not easy to know the story and the maps and what you need to do on 4 or 5 different RPG games at the same time ).
The card had to be returned for factory issues but I so far have not purchased another card, not because I don't want free games but because I don't want so many games that I won't give em a fair try.
Now I can see why someone would wanna carry a lot more games than me, but I cannot see why somebody would want to carry 40-50 games. That is just unrealistic and pointless, you are never going to get to enjoy all of them, you are never going to get to spend enough time with em.
It is the same with music: if you just want background noise get an FM radio. If you wanna hear music you can pretty much limit yourself to 6 or 7 different albums and truly pay attention and LISTEN, not just hear but listen to em.
If I wanted my full collection for a long trip I would either carry my laptop or my collection in optical media and still select only 1.5 gb of stuff I actually want to listen while on the bus or otherwise commuting.
Just because technology is available doesn't means that you have to spend like a maniac on it if you don't really need it. What I dislike about apple is precisely this, to a larger extend they encourage this consumerist attitude of giving people useless features they don't really need, of pushing technology thats highly unnecessary.
