A CD Boombox is difficult to find, so I offered to help someone buy one. Here are two related thoughts that stuck with me:
First, is that record players have supplanted CD players. My local Walmart still sells CDs but not CD players. Yet they sell LP records and record players.
I searched for a recording of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1 for another friend. Several on Archive.org were analog recordings that were digitized from vinyl – the incessant scratchy noise drove me bonkers! One recording even had a skip! Doesn't the scratchy noise bother people? This is why I jumped onto the CD bandwagon in the 1980s. Does modern equipment have a way to suppress it, like the Dolby Noise Reduction0 used on tape? If so, it would require new vinyl pressings with pre-emphasis, which would sound strange on legacy turntables.
Second, it's also difficult to find a new computer with a CD/DVD drive. Of the 41 Dell desktops I viewed, only 14 can be equipped with an optical drive.1 And none of the 67 laptops have one – Dell doesn't even offer an "optical drive" filter to narrow the search results.
Lacking a RW optical drive, it's not possible to back up a music collection by RIPing CDs. The cynic in me thinks the entertainment industry wants to phase out CD drives to make it difficult for consumers to copy music and movies.
I suspect that newer generations think it's normal to pay for online content, and for subscriptions to content they've already bought. They might not realize they don't own the content – instead, they pay to merely consume it. You could counter, saying that I don't own the content on my CDs and DVDs either. And I know that. But I've paid for it once, and I can listen repeatedly without paying again.
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system
1 The Dell Pro line of workstations and desktops were excluded from this assessment.
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