(At least, I assume that's the reason they stopped allowing removable storage. Some people argue that it was just a way for them to squeeze out extra profit by forcing you to pay them if you wanted extra storage, but that's crazy talk.)
I'm assuming it's mostly just about giving an easy way to do price discrimination as you imply, but I can see those actually being real issues too.
Now, send me back with my laptop and it's a completely different story. I've got enough development stuff on that to make serious dough. It would be really weird... probably the fastest communication mechanisms we'd have are using the speaker for modem-based communication, and using the webcam to scan in incoming data somehow, since nothing in that era can even say "hello" to any port I currently have, but we'd be able to get somewhere.
Or take a portable solar charger with you.
> but... then what? No internet, no wireless, no mechanism for input or output... it wouldn't be quite useless, but it's not all that useful.
It can hold a gigantic amount of invaluable information.
English Wikipedia as an HTML dump seems to be just 15GB[1]. I think that includes images. All OSM planetary map data seems to be storable in 45GB[2].
If only all knowledge was as accessible.
[1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/static_html_dumps/current/...
Which can only be extracted by somebody hand-copying it down. Possibly we can work up some sort of photograph-based system to just graphically copy it to a book or something, though. Which is also the only hope you have of extracting the map data, too.
This is the sort of thing I mean; things you take for granted as being valuable have huge chunks of their value chain hacked away.
Audio content would be the easiest to deal with; cell phones would output master-quality recordings of whatever music you may have, because 1960 cables are still bigger than your phone's little jack, but at least they can fabricate a smaller one, electrically compatible with what they already have.
High end smartphone in your pocket would be basically ASCI Red. Worth $67 million in real dollars.
EDIT: From looking at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110926225845/http://www.sandia...
It's RAM. Storage is at 12TB. 1.2TB of RAM... I think we still have a ways to go before our phones can do that.
Storage-wise, I have ~140GB total storage. I think that's above average, but that bus would still need around 100 such phones.
I don't know how the buses are in your city. In mine, even when people are packed like sardines, I don't think we get near those numbers.
That said your numbers are still roughly correct. I don't think you can reasonably fit 200 people in a city bus, even one of those English double decker busses.