While I get that the question may have been largely rhetorical, I like to carry my music collection around on my laptop. I've been accruing it for over 10 year

While I get that the question may have been largely rhetorical, I like to carry my music collection around on my laptop. I've been accruing it for over 10 years now, and y'know, it has my songs and stuff. While it obviously wouldn't kill me to not have it, having it on my laptop solves the "OMG I need to hear so-and-so, right now". Also, if I don't have it on my PC, then where? It's a sizable enough collection that hosting it somewhere could get costly (and is, actually, I back it up to S3 [though looking to migrate that to Glacier now]). Lastly, not everybody has the pervasive bandwidth you speak of. I live in Annapolis, and bandwidth is groovy out here on Verizon FIOS, but (ironically, I suppose) my office in Mountain View has horrible bandwidth. Other than that, it's hit or miss at coffee shops, and if the bandwidth seems even slightly dodgy, I'd feel like a prick streaming my music over it at everybody else's expense. Backing up to look at your other question, the 'Only 40Gb' is kind of a big deal. I mean, Microsoft Office and an Adobe suite together probably take up a quarter of that, leaving you at 30Gb, add a few more large applications and it's believable that you're down to 20Gb without any actual user data. After that, your resume probably takes up a good 4 megs, and then it's on to cat pictures, MP3s and porn, for which 19.999Gb is not nearly adequate.