I imagine it's not the primary storage for OP, but syncs from the library on Mac, which is probably has a backup strategy itself.

As commenter above noted, you probably don't need lossless audio on your portable device if you only listen through earbuds, but if you use connect it to some good speakers or high quality headphones, then why shouldn't you be able to?

As for the quality difference in general, I ripped my own CD collection at lossless quality many years ago because given the choice of the same quality or worse quality that I may or may not be able to discern, it's seemed more logical to take the former. The lost data would never have been recoverable later.

Exactly this. I don't understand why people are giving up on quality and bend over for guys like Tim Cook who push down worse quality products consistently. They need to realise that wireless audio is just not there for all the use cases (leave the jack alone) and instead of faster processors we need bigger storage.

I have my primary storage on my laptop (+ secondary backups). I sync music from my laptop to my phone. you are suggesting I should convert the music to lower quality because most people cannot distinguish between lossless and mp3? I should compromise because companies refuse to deliver what I want and what I would pay for? That is the really lousy argument. Btw. you do not need to be genetically gifted to hear the difference. Also you do not need an _expensive_ headphone you need one with great sound quality. There are plenty of hifi headphones with reasonable pricing.