I can't help but feel the real elephant in the room here is the assumption that it's valid to expect tens to hundreds of gigabytes of compressed audio to be immediately accessible, and from a laptop no less.
What we have is general advice(which is correct) being countered by a someone citing a specific situation, in which all the aspects that make the advice non-applicable are constraints they have imposed on their self.
50 GB of music on a Macbook, which would require upgrading and this cost an extra $300, so it's not cheap. Does everyone need a Macbook? Does everyone need to use a laptop? Does everyone need over 17 days of music immediately accessible? Even if it's immediately accessible, does it need to be locally stored, or is remote access applicable?
The comment starts out with "I'm sick of the "storage is insanely cheap" refrain from FLAC proponents." What I meant by "valid" is does it apply to the majority of the audience the comment was aimed at, or are we hearing about someone's self-imposed problems?
It's sort of like a discussion about driving safety, and someone suggests using a specific high safety rated car which costs a little most, but not too much, and someone else jumping in and complaining how they are tired of that suggestion because the convertible version of that car costs far more. While technically correct, I would argue that the original advice probably wasn't even aimed at that person, but at those who value safety more that having a convertible.
Similarly, here we have someone that may care about quality, but I don't think it's hard to argue from their statements that they care less about quality than a few other factors, such as using an Apple product, using a laptop, keeping their files local, and having a very large store of music. Since the source of this stated "If you're really concerned over sound quality: use something lossless, like FLAC." I think it's entirely valid to point out that self imposed constraints such as the ones in this discussion are definitely something worth looking at when someone calls the usefulness of the comment in question.
That said, I'll fully admit I didn't express that well, and could have come across as preachy (and maybe I still am). I just think the original comment was worthwhile (if you care, keep your originals lossless), and didn't think the counter was very well presented at all.
