Anyone who lives in New York City will tell you there are times when you just need to get away. Recently, I escaped upstate for the weekend, and while I was there, I finished John Maeda's excellent little book The Laws of Simplicity, reading by the fire as a freak spring snowstorm blanketed the mountains. The unusually tranquil environment might have something to do with it, but I couldn't shake the thought that simplicity is in precious short supply these days--particularly when it comes to technology. We test product after product here at PC Magazine, and so many of them fail because they're nowhere near as simple as they should be.

John Maeda is a professor, designer, and digital artist at MIT's Media Lab, and I've admired his work for some time. Just a hundred pages long, The Laws of Simplicity is overflowing with cleverly packaged soundbites, aphorisms, and more acronyms that you can shake a S-T-I-C-K at. That includes everything from SHE (Shrink, Hide, Embody), a guide for successful product design, to SLIP (Sort, Label, Integrate, Prioritize), a method for organizing your life. No, you won't find KISS (You know: Keep It Simple, Stupid). It's a testament to Maeda's genius that he wrote a book on simplicity, yet managed to avoid that one.

I could list all ten laws, but they're easy enough to find online. I'll just give you Law 10, the most important: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful." This is something that Apple surely understands--but among technology companies, Jobs and the gang are in the minority.

PC Mag just finished testing the Sansa Connect, a device that really changes what digital audio players can do. Using built-in Wi-Fi, it automatically accesses Yahoo!'s online catalog of two million tracks of digital music, playing selections that cater to your particular musical interests. It's pretty impressive. Even so, most of us on staff, and presumably most users, would still prefer the Apple iPod nano. Not because it does more, but because it does less. The iPod interface is just plain easier to use. And that makes all the difference.

I've noticed the same pattern as I read coverage of the cell-phone market by our columnist and lead analyst Sascha Segan. Vendors are adding all sorts of new features to their cell phones, when they'd be better off making common functions easier to use. Most midrange handsets these days are capable of SMS, e-mail, Web browsing, playing MP3s, and even games, but most users never discover these features, which are buried under arcane, counterintuitive menus. Just ask yourself how many people out there are living with their phone's default beeps and alerts because they don't know how to turn them off. Making calls is easy, but if you want to sell all those extra features and functions, they have to be simpler.

Apple's way with simplicity isn't limited to the iPod. I'll let the Mac versus PC battle slide for now, but we're starting to hear the same patter in the emerging field of media extenders. When we got out hands on the Apple TV, we had it up and running in less than an hour. By comparison, setting up the Netgear Digital Entertainer took days. Even if you ignore its stability problems, the Digital Entertainer is just a hassle. Don't get me wrong, it does more. It plays more file formats and lets you stream HD content from your PC. But Apple TV does what most people want--and it requires less effort.

Now, there is an important difference between consumer devices such as Apple TV and the classic PC. The PC is by nature a multitasker, a tool capable of an immense range of tasks, from calculating spreadsheets to playing music. It'll never be a simple thing, and it shouldn't be. Even the vaunted Mac OS is hugely complex. For consumer electronics, simplicity rules, but with computers, most people still prefer power and flexibility. I know I do.

After all, sitting in the mountains meditating on the relative simplicity of media extenders, I needed to get these words down. Fortunately, I brought my notebook. And those hills have excellent EV-DO coverage.