When Apple’s iTunes was launched in 2001, it was a tool to organize and search music by artist, genre, and other similarly straightforward categories. Today, iTunes organizes your music, TV shows and movies, podcasts, and iPhone and iPad apps, not to mention syncing all of your Apple devices and iCloud storage and offering “iTunes Radio,” a nod to taste-based music shuffling programs like Pandora. This is just one example of how Apple — the brand still famous for being streamlined and straightforward — has grown increasingly complex over the past decade.
On the other hand, Apple and its competitors are all facing the increasing complexity of the technological world, and Apple’s line of products is as straightforward as ever — they still do not include instruction manuals.