Why do we accept below quality audio files from Apple?

In my genereation there was the audio cassette tape. Slow (fast) forward and rewind. Scratchy sound. There were the occassional eaten (by the player) tapes. But, by george, you could make copies to your heart's content! Give music to your friends. Make copies of the new album they just bought. Then came the compact disc (CD) with its high quality audio. Real track or fast forward/rewind. And spinning just like the LP. And LASER! There was a laser in every CD player. LASER! OK, only I got excited about lasers. This was the mid 80's, we didn't have PS2 back then. Eventually, recordable CD-ROMS became affordable enough where everyone and their dog could have one in their computer. Let the boot-leggin' good times roll. Copy, copy, remix, remake. We now progress into the internet era and eventually download our music, whether legal or illegal.

And here is my gripe. When did we all accept that our music doesn't get reproduced at high quality anymore? Remember when there was such a phrase as "CD quality"? Now everyone buys music from Apple's iTunes at 128kbps compression. And we all accept it. We pay for compressed music that still costs about as much as if we were to buy the whole album on CD. Sure it's more convenient and there's instant gratification. Companies have gone out of business building all this fat bandwidth fiber optics in order for us to have broadband. Let's move forward and not backwards to the cassette tapes. It's time we complain to Steve Jobs and demand that our music is sold to us uncompressed! Or you can continue to buy music CD's. Which I think is better because you get liner notes, photos, and info about the music and band you're buying. Plus, you can then rip it to your own computer using a lossless compression for full high fidelity surround sound.