[For earlier posts in this series, click here, here, and here.]

Imagine yourself back in childhood, sitting in the back seat of the family station wagon, en route to one of those long, high-stress family vacations that Americans have honed to perfection. Mom and Dad are arguing over what went wrong so far on the trip, and of course, how they could have avoided these mishaps. Why didn't we ask for directions at the last gas station, instead of letting Dad navigate by dead reckoning? Should someone have called ahead to ensure that there wasn't a problem with the hotel reservations? Who was supposed to remember to pack the camera? Was it reasonable to expect a travel rate of 500 miles a day? Quickly, your vision of vacation as a straight line into the heart of fun evaporates. Replacing it is a circuitous flowchart, each serpentine twist representing a different set of decision points, estimates, and possible outcomes. Who knows what might happen next? The wheels will fall off on a desert highway, and someone will have forgotten to renew the AAA membership?

Ever since I got an iPad, I've been eager for the update to the upgrade to the iOS4 operating system that premiered on the iPhone months ago. The ease of use of the iPad erodes, grain by grain, with each app that you add to it, as long as you're forced to keep sweeping across page after page of apps. Organizing apps into functional groups across pages is a tedious process. After a while, you really feel the need for folders to organize your apps more effectively.

Imagine my disappointment, therefore, when iTunes froze as soon as I launched it. It was the start of yet another chapter in the story of my hate-hate relationship with iTunes, because of its unstoppable bloat and accompanying seizures. With every major update, iTunes grows another layer of fat, causing more frequent electronic coronaries when it needs to run (or waddle) through its paces. I can't say I was surprised that iTunes froze, forcing me to reinstall it (the software equivalent of sending someone to fat camp?) before I could get it working again.

Here, from a single company, on a single desktop, is the history of the tech industry's problems with complexity. A device that is consummately simple to use, the iPad, is handcuffed, like a slender Sidney Poitier to a morbidly obese Tony Curtis, to iTunes. As Apple keeps jamming more of its business plan, in the form of new features (Genius, Ping, etc.) and new content (anything that could be described as "released" or "published"), iTunes swells to ever-increasing levels of complexity.