>when you buy songs on iTunes you don't have to sync them to your iPod
I think you mean "if" not "when". (Why buy songs there, that seems a very expensive way to do it when they are freely downloadable elsewhere...) The part about syncing effectively means, basically, that it doesn't actually give you the file (ie. download it to your device) until you play it. You just have, effectively, the right to download it. Which means that you would have to make sure you have an Internet connection available when you play it (as well as when you bought it), and would also have to wait for it to download before you could play it. That doesn't seem advantageous.
>You get a cheaper and more rugged device and when you buy songs on iTunes you don't have to sync them to your iPod. Walking around with a magnetic hard disk that will die if you shake it too much or some immensely expensive flash based device that you have to manually sync with a PC, is just not attractive to modern users.
iPhones are about the least rugged devices out there, a drop of approximately one foot is sufficient to break the screen and render it unusable. That seems to be the most likely point of failure, the ruggedness of the storage is secondary.
>And guess what? If you connect to a friend's computer, you can still listen to your music by connecting to the cloud... even though he doesn't have a copy of your music.
If you have all your files on your device there is no need to use the cloud. You could copy all the songs from your device to your friend's device, and vice versa, faster than downloading them all from a cloud account (not to mention data caps). Cloud-based storage might be useful for backing up unimportant files to, but another hard disk would generally be better for various reasons (cost, speed, security, etc.).
